The Testimony

BREAKDOWN

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

The press referred to the incident as my having a breakdown, but it was actually the complete opposite: it was the clearest that my mind had been in years.

We had another emergency Cabinet meeting because of the hospital situation, and they told us about people falling ill, getting sick, dying. There were some men in lab coats delivering a report to us, but they didn’t seem to have anything concrete. People are dying at an exponentially higher rate than in previous days or weeks, one of them said. What’s causing it? somebody asked, and they said, It’s a variety of things: some are dying from pre-existing conditions, cancers, diseases we knew that they had, and some have died of what we’d term natural causes. And the flu, the other lab coat said, some have died from complications arising from the flu. What do we do? the Deputy PM asked, and they suggested telling people to remain calm. We’re doing tests, they said, and we don’t know how long it’ll be before we know what’s happened. Could it be one of those animal flus, like we had at the start of the decade? somebody asked, and they shrugged. Could be, they said. When they had gone we discussed a curfew, to keep everybody under control; all the schools and businesses were shut anyway, so a curfew wasn’t far off. If there is something we need to stop it spreading, was the general logic, and you can’t argue with that. My mother’s ill, and she won’t last long, somebody said, so we really should think about ways that we can find out what this is. That was my breaking point, if memory serves. I stood up, and told them all that they were – and I rarely swear, but – fucking insane. We’re paddling a leaky raft, I said, and it’s clearly bloody sinking, so let’s either patch it or just abandon ship, yes? They all looked blank then, and the Deputy PM said, Well, Simon, we’re talking about ways to fix this, but we have to err on the side of caution. He smiled, as if that made it all alright.

Then I quit, I said. We’ve let the Americans bomb a country that hadn’t done anything wrong; we’ve got riots and protests all over the country; people flooding to churches because they heard something speaking to them, something that might be scientifically plausible, or might actually be a fat man with a beard in the sky; and we’re sitting here discussing the latest turn of events, that people are dying for no bloody good reason, and we’re talking about it the same way that we fanny about discussing every other bloody thing that crosses our desks. We never get anywhere, with anything; we just bide our time until we have to make decisions. I think we’ve proven exactly how useless we are, so I quit. I walked out, down the stairs, shouted my resignation to the press and jumped into the first car I saw, told the driver to take me to my offices.

I told my assistant what I had done as I packed my boxes, and she swore blue murder at me, because I had promised her a rise and now clearly wasn’t going to deliver it. Go home and observe the impending curfew! I said, and she stormed off. I went home before the paps turned up, didn’t put the news on. Instead I cooked a crispy duck from the freezer that I had been saving, finished reading a book on Orson Welles that I’d been putting off before because I never had the time.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

The day was the longest I had in my planner, packed full of appointments. It always gets like this, the receptionist told me, which I think she meant to sound reassuring, but I took it there and then that she was telling me to leave; maybe she had a spurned lover who was the doctor that I replaced, and he wanted his job back. My appointment for before lunch – which didn’t happen anyway, as lunch was always pushed back, and I ended up with room-temperature egg sandwiches from a machine that they had installed in the waiting rooms – was an emergency, it said, somebody who didn’t live in Bangalore. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the man with the foot, but I was: as I forgot (or tried to forget) about Adele, I forgot about everything else in Bankipore – the smell, the dirt, the hotel, the camera crew, my family. That patient, and his dying, necrotic foot.

He bundled into the room on crutches, dragging the foot behind him. Well now! he said, sounding almost happy to see me, this is a fortunate surprise! I said hello to him – I cannot remember his name now, another of the things that I forget – and he sat in the chair, lowering himself so clumsily. I stood and held my hands out as if I was going to help him sit, but I didn’t, though I don’t know why. I had touched so many people with worse illnesses over my life, but his foot… I could smell it through the bandage, through the air conditioning in the room, air conditioning which usually dragged every smell away apart from the strict stink of the disinfectant they used on the floors and surfaces. I tried to not vomit at the smell. Listen, the man said, my foot has got worse, you wouldn’t believe it. What are you doing here? I asked him, and he said, My daughter lives here, she paid for me to get the train here and visit her while I was sick, because I can’t walk well, you know. I saw that the bandage was the same one that I had put on him last; he noticed me looking at it. No, no, he said, sounding embarrassed, my daughter has washed the bandage you gave me, I have used antiseptic on the wound and kept it clean, like you said. He held his leg up, his foot out, as if he wanted me to take it. When I didn’t – because, I can’t tell you about the smell enough, how strong and revolting it was – he shrugged, crossed it over his good leg, started unwrapping the bandage. When it was done, I had never seen anything like it. I know it’s bad, he said; he kept eye contact, his eyes red, and he didn’t want to look at it. I’m sure it will be absolutely fine, I told him, there are very few problems like this that can’t be fixed. I was lying. You’ll need to go to the hospital, though; I can refer you. Can I call your daughter, get her to take you? No, he said, don’t bother her, I’ll go tomorrow morning. I can take you now, I said, you really should go, and I’ll make sure you get seen straight away. No, no, he said, but I insisted. I called for a taxi, told the receptionist where I was going, to cancel my appointments for the afternoon. I gave him a clean towel to wrap around his foot – I told him that it was because I wanted to keep it getting air, but really, I couldn’t bear to touch the limb in order to wrap real bandages on it – and we got in the back of the car. The journey only took a few minutes, but neither of us spoke, so it seemed like an eternity.

The hospital wasn’t busy at all, and they rushed the man through. What’s his name? one of the nurses asked me when they were looking at him. I don’t remember, I said. You’re not family? No, no, I told her, I’m his doctor, at a clinic. I told her the name of the district I worked in and she nodded. Okay, we’ll let you know how he is. I can’t come through? I asked, but she shook her head. You can leave, or you can sit and wait. I chose to sit and wait. I telephoned the receptionist – Oh, you should stay there for the day, watch over him, she said, and I thought of her sneaking her lover back into my office, his old office, and letting him take on my workload – and then I put myself on those awful chairs in the corner of the room, near to the door through to the surgical wing so that the nurses wouldn’t forget that I was there. Once, the same nurse walked past me and smiled, and I said, I told him to come and see you days and days ago, before it got this bad, but he wouldn’t listen to me; what can you do? She didn’t answer me.

Night came, and I asked them again, How is the man I came in with? He’s in surgery, the nurse told me. What for, what are they doing to him? I don’t know, she said. I’ll try and find somebody to let you know. But she didn’t, so I ended up lying on those chairs and trying to go to sleep.

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

David’s funeral was very different to Patrice’s, first of all because it nearly didn’t happen. The churches were so busy that they said it would be weeks and weeks before they even thought about it, and the hospital wouldn’t keep the body in the morgue for long. It’ll need to be disposed of, they said, we’re too busy, too many bodies. They broke it down to something that basic; no room here, move along. David’s parents wouldn’t stop crying. We want to bury our son! they said, so we went to one of the private cemeteries, negotiated a price for a space. Jacques went to pick up his body by himself, driving David’s parents’ car. I offered to go, but he said that I should stay with them.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

I stood over his body and tried to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault, that he would have killed himself anyway, found a way to; but that gun. I kept seeing it, seeing the guy holding it up, the crazy guy with the beard, and then me taking it, because I thought it was, what? Funny? When I moved David’s body I had to do it by myself, put it on a trolley and wheel it to the car and bundle the black sack onto the back seat like I was a grave-robber, and the whole drive back I kept thinking that if I looked in the rear-view mirror he would be sitting there, hole in his face, begging me to stop it from ever happening.

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

We buried him without any sort of religious service. He has come to us, proven Himself to us, and then David did this? We can’t do this in God’s name, in His light. We dug the hole and we put his body in, without a coffin, just in the ground. This is probably illegal, Jacques said, and he was right, I think, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that David was laid to rest. Even though they didn’t want it, I said a prayer as we threw the soil on, only whispered it, so nobody heard me saying it. Jolie came down with us, read something – she and David had a thing a while back, didn’t turn to anything, but she knew what he liked. She read a poem he used to love by Claude Royet-Journoud. It was a poem that sounded like it wasn’t meant to be read, you know? Of course, we didn’t even know he liked poetry in the first place. When the service was over, or when we were finished, Jacques stormed off. I chased after him but he had disappeared.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

The last line of the poem was something about the body being a life-sentence in the future, like, being alive would be a crime; and that pissed me off, that Jolie chose that to send David away with, that she didn’t choose something that honoured his life more. I don’t fucking know, I stormed off, and I was in the woods down from the graveyard when I realized that the space between my teeth was bleeding again. The day before it had been getting better, and then, all of a sudden, I started to taste the blood again, as if I was sucking on a cent.

Peter Johns, biologist, Auckland

My assistant, Terry – Trigger, we called him – he found the eggs. I have rotten insomnia – I just don’t sleep. They say I’m losing sleep, but that isn’t true. It’s not like that; I can’t find it to begin with. My wife’s a saint, putting up with me like this. It spreads, the insomnia, to narcolepsy, just falling asleep, nodding off when you’ll be doing something else. My body, the docs said, just decided when it needed to sleep, and it happened when it happened. We were – me and Trig – out on a drive-around and we parked up when he saw me passed out next to him. Of course, I don’t remember squat, but this is what he told me. So when I’m asleep he wanders off, he’s checking out a nest we know about – the Tieke, beautiful bird, only a few of them left, so we nurture them where we can – and he sees some eggs in the nest, none of the birds there. When he gets back he notes it down, like we do with all the unattended nests, in case they don’t come back and we have to step in, and we head back. That evening, on the way home – Trig’s driving again, I didn’t trust myself some days – he says, Wait, let’s check out the nest, and the eggs are still there, but there’s no birds around, so he suggests that we take them, stick them in the incubator. Where the bloody hell has their mum got to? Trig asked, because they weren’t abandoners. Some birds? Couldn’t trust them to stay ten minutes after the eggs have popped, but the Tieke, they were nesters. Must have left, I said, maybe they’re scared of being bombed, eh? She’ll be back. But, as I said, we couldn’t afford to take those things for granted, right? So we climb up, take them out of the nest, put them in one of the boxes we’ve got, and we got them back to the labs, put them in the incubators.

Hameed Yusuf Ahmed, imam, Leeds

Another day of endless queues of people asking for me to give them some sort of validation. They had seen the priests on television reassuring their parishioners, followers, flock, that they were listening to their own particular God, a Christian God, telling them that He was there to help them; they all asked me the same questions, and I told them all that I didn’t have an answer for them. I don’t even think that mattered, I don’t think they expected a truth; they just wanted reassurance that they weren’t on their own. I was important to them; they wanted to know that I was just as confused as they were. I reassured them in my beliefs, and they left, and that should have been enough. It wasn’t, of course; they went back to their homes and they were just as confused as they were before they spoke to me. Fortitude of faith, I told them, believe in your God, that He will make everything as it should be. Remember, we are told to not question His faith. Remember this.

Samia was in the queue, along with all the rest. I saw her when there were four or five people in front of her; she waved at me, softly, so she didn’t draw attention. When it was her time, she sat in front of me professionally, folded her hands in her lap. What’s so important it couldn’t wait? I asked her. I’ll be home in a couple of hours. I wanted to address you in the same manner that everybody else does, she said, and I want actual answers. She pulled out a list of questions – the same questions as she had asked me before, written down so that she didn’t forget any – and started reading them out. You tell me when you’ve got an answer to one of them, she said, stop me from reading them out and answer it, because I don’t think that you do.

I feel like you’re accusing me of something, I said, and I don’t like that. This isn’t the time for us to have an argument; my community needs me. She snorted at that, like a dragon. I need you, she said. I have questions, and you should be answering them. I want to know if you even think that our God – Allah – if you even think that He’s real, because I’m not so sure. Don’t say that, I said, but I don’t know if she heard me, because I think my voice was too quiet. This is no way to live, in the darkness like this, not even knowing, she told me. We do know, I said, of course we know. We don’t, Hameed. She looked so sad. We don’t know anything.

Benedict Tabu Tshisekedi, militia, Democratic Republic of Congo

After the second time we heard it, the white people seemed convinced that it was their God, somehow talking to them through the magic of their minds. He had opened a channel to them, and given them hysteria. They had brought with them a map when they first arrived, a map that they spread out on the ground and showed us, not only in terms of the world itself, but also their individual countries, and they tried to teach us to pronounce their place names – Jämtland, Norrköping, Sjælland – and when we could not, or when some of the youngsters asked more questions about places that they had already heard the names of (What is America like? I want to visit America!), they got restless, and put the map away. Another time, they said. That was a week before The Broadcast, when they arrived in their convoy of jeeps.

The day before the static, another jeep arrived, with two more white men and a black man. The black man was armed, with a gun that none of us recognized. We played like boys, and asked to see it, and he held it out and showed it to us from a distance. He was American, the only one who wasn’t the same colour as the skin on the bellies of our goats. He held the gun out and said, There, you can see it, and one of us, Peter, asked if he could hold it, but the American said that he could not. I know what you boys are like, he said. By that point, we were already eating the food that the white people had brought with them, and we were helping to build the school that they wanted to make with us. When we’ve built it, they said, we can start to teach you in it, and then when you leave here you will be prepared for the outside world. We can give you an education, and that’s a gift that every child should be given. We did not say this, but we were not children. The children of the village stood behind their mothers’ legs and were scared of the white men; we puffed out our chests and took strides just as long as they did, our feet falling into the same marks in the sand, our sandal prints filling the holes of the prints made by their heavy boots. We wore sandals and shorts and shirts when we saw them, unlike the children, who stayed naked as they cowered. We had spent the week before the black American came building the school, because our fathers were not in the village, and we were the protectors. The white men offered no threat, but they brought materials to make the buildings, and our mothers seemed happy with the thought of what they could do, and Father Saul – who was the priest that had lived with us for over a year by that point, come down to us from Darfur, far north, bringing with him the word and teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ – said that we should listen to them. They’re only here for your benefit, he said. It was Saul that named us – he is responsible for me being named Benedict, which was not my name before he arrived with God eight years before, and it was Saul that ensured that we could all speak English, because it was the language of the future, he said – so we listened to him. He established the church that we used, which was also his house, and he was the one who shook hands with the white men when they arrived, introduced us, told us to not be scared. They acted like old friends, but they never spoke about how they knew each other, if they did at all. Saul is the one who told us that a schooling would be how we could move to America! So when the American came, we wanted to know first about his gun – which was much cleaner than our guns, and the bullets felt so heavy compared to what we were used to – and then we wanted to know how he came to live in America. I was born there, he said, which we could not believe. How did your father and mother come to live in America? we asked, and he said, They were born there as well. When he arrived, we had already built much of the building for the school – there were thirty of us, who the white men called boys, but we knew we were the men of the village, and we worked fast.

That evening, the American slept inside the school we had built; when we said prayers together, all of us, even the white men mumbling through the words we knew from heart but that they struggled to learn, he kept his mouth shut, and he did not say Amen, even though he then ate the food with us. Father Saul had told us that this was a crime against God, and that He would punish you in His kingdom, so when the American did it we did not say anything, but when he was asleep we spoke about how it would have repercussions. I didn’t really sleep that night: I stayed up and watched my mother and my sisters sleep instead, and occasionally looked at the American in the shell of the schoolhouse, because he awoke in the early hours of the morning, and I wanted to see what he would do. I did not trust him, and his gun would be able to take on ten of ours.

In the morning, I was awake early, because it was my job to walk to the well, make sure that we had water. Father Saul had been responsible for the well being as good as it was; soon after he arrived, he had some people come down to look at it. They brought a machine with them to dig deeper into the ground, and from that point the water was cleaner. When my father left with the other fathers, it became my job to do the water in the mornings. Other boys became farmers as they became men – we had seven different animals, and then farming cereals, which was the other source of food. I fetched water, which was risky, because sometimes there were complications, and other people wanted the water from us. I was fetching the water late when I heard it – because I had been awake, and because we were all awake until late in the night, and then it was a long walk to the water, and a longer one back, or it felt like, carrying it. I was walking back when I heard the static for the first time, and I thought that it was something coming across the land between me and the village. We always had animals, so I thought that it could be that, and it wasn’t until I got back with the water – less than usual, because I ran slightly, I was excited and nervous to make it home – and everybody had heard it. We asked the white men what it was. Was it a helicopter? asked Anthony, one of my friends. Maybe, they said. They spent the rest of the day playing with the radio in their jeep, and thinking it was that. We could tell, because they tuned the static in on it over and over, even though it sounded different. When it happened again, they even stopped talking to us, and the project – to build the school – was put on hold for the day. We’ll come to it tomorrow, they said, and they got into their jeep and complained that their telephones weren’t working properly.

Two of them left to go and make a telephone call, and two of them stayed behind, with the American. They didn’t really talk to us, and our mothers said, Pretend that they are not even here for the day, we have so much to do. They all moved into the school, and we didn’t even eat dinner with them that night.

The first Broadcast happened the next day. We were sitting on the floor – only half the men of the village were there, the rest were off doing the jobs that their fathers had done before they had left – and we were watching our mothers making food, preparing lunch. Some of the boys had caught a huge bird, and we had all pulled its feathers off, and the women were getting the meat from its bones. Then we heard the voice, and Father Saul began to weep. What was that? Anthony asked. What was that voice? It was God, Father Saul said. That was the voice of the Lord our God, speaking to us, His faithful soldiers. Why did He speak to us? I asked, and Father Saul said, Because we have spent time with Him, devoted to Him. Because we are faithful, and we exist for Him. Father Saul was a good man. He tried to spend time with us, teaching us the ways of the good Christian, educating us – he was our school before the promise of the school – and trying to help us with the future. This was his goal, he would always say, to help us find our way towards the future. We should pray, he said, and he started, and we all joined in. The two white men and the American stood away from us and watched us, and kept looking in the direction that their friends had driven, every few minutes glancing down the track. We prayed all day, and Father Saul tried to involve the white men. He is the God of all of us, he said, you can pray alongside us. We are okay, they said, we have work to do, but all they seemed to be doing was looking at maps and walking around with a telephone – Anthony told me that it worked from something in the sky, as high as the stars, but he was a fantasist – and getting angry with each other. I asked them eventually why they were so angry, why they did not rejoice as we did. We just want to know where our friends are, one of them told me – the more friendly of the two – so I said, Well, God will be keeping them safe. The other one of them, the one who looked at us less, who always seemed distracted, he said, Don’t be fucking ridiculous! He said it with so much anger that the American even stepped forward. He did not raise his gun, but he stepped forward to listen, but I said nothing more.

By the night it was clear, I think, that the other white men were lost, or had decided to stay in Mwanza for longer; when we all went to sleep that evening, we could hear the white men arguing with the American about how long it would take them to walk it. He said it would be two days, maybe – we knew that it would be more like three, and suspected that he knew this also – and they said that on the next morning they would leave. When we woke up they were packing their things, still looking down the road every few minutes. The American came to me and asked if he could accompany me to the well, as they needed to fill their canteens. I told him that he could, and we walked off together. He was very tall, and wide. When I told him this, he said that he used to play American football. Like soccer? I asked, which was a sport that Father Saul had introduced to us. Nah, different. You play with your hands, and you run, and you tackle people. He showed me a tackle, how it would happen, barging his shoulder into my side, but he didn’t knock me over; I think he was worried about how thin I was, because he kept saying, You should eat more. We got to the well and I showed him how to get the water, and then we walked back, and I asked if I could hold his gun. Sure, he said, but only you, only here. I looked down the sight and I could see so far, animals in the distance. I could shoot one, I said, and he said, You could, but that wouldn’t be fair. It’s all about fair: don’t shoot what can’t shoot back, that’s a rule to live by. As we walked again I asked him if he was happy that we heard the voice of the Lord, and he said, Sure, if that’s what it was. What else could it be? He said, I’m waiting until I get home, and I can work that one out for myself.

By the time we were home – because we were late, as I walked slowly so that I could talk to the American more – everybody was wondering where we were, and the white men were getting nervous. We have to leave, they said. They were putting their bags on their backs when we heard the second Broadcast. Father Saul called us all into the middle of the village when it was done and led us in prayer again. We are not afraid, Lord! he said, but the white men didn’t seem to agree with him. They spoke in their own language – it sounded like they were confused, slipping over the English words that we knew, making them sound almost like singing – and then barked at the American, telling him that they had to leave. He said, We should wait, because I don’t know what that is. We’ll go without you, they said, and he said, Fine, I’ll wait for the others. They’ll come back. The angry white man, the one with no patience, he ran over and grabbed at the water packs, and then reached for the American’s gun. We’ll need this, he said. The American laughed. You’re not taking the gun, he said. Give us the fucking weapon, the angry white man shouted. We paid for you to be here, and then they wrestled over it. It looked dangerous, until Father Saul stepped in and picked up one of our guns from one of the boys and shot the angry white man in the foot, and the man fell backwards, onto the floor, crying out. What is wrong with you people? Father Saul asked – his English was better than the rest of us, because he was much older, and he had been speaking it for many, many years, and when he spoke with authority it sounded like a king or a president – and then he went over to the white men and told them that God had spoken, and that they would do well to listen. Have you not thought: all this violence here, and yet He still speaks to us? This is a magic, this is what we needed most, and you will flee from it? You are cowards, and God will punish the meek.

For the rest of the day, the white men looked after each other, watched by the American, though he stopped at dinner and joined us, and prayed, even. In fact, I think the white man who wasn’t shot prayed as well, which means the only one that didn’t was the one who lay on the floor in pain, writhing, trying to keep the ground-dirt from going into his wound, which, Father Saul said, was his penance.