Kirinya, page 24
The soldiers were chasing the people out, come on come on come on, eyes on the sky. They scattered into the open country, running, dragging children, carrying the maimed and the dying. Two helicopters held back to work over the remains of Soroti. The other three peeled off to hunt down the fleeing. One locked its nose on to a Red Cross Landcruiser and blew it to nothing. Oksana saw Robyn Elders start to run for the UNHCR 4×4. She made it no further than the bottom step. The air-burst sent her, the whole side of the prefab raving up in a spray of fragments. Dirt and debris and diamond knives rained down on Oksana as she fought to hot-wire the Toyota.
‘Start you bitch whore fucker!’
Flash: Serena, the gates within reach.
‘Start, fuck you, start!’ She cursed the car in all her tongues, and it started for her.
The west end of the camp was burning: fuel from the destroyed truck point. Oksana swung the Landcruiser through tributaries of fire; it clung greedily to her wheels before earth snuffed it out. There.
‘Ren!’
For a second Serena did not know what she was seeing. Outer and inner visions coalesced. There was a car. There was a woman calling her name.
Oksana hauled her in by a fistful of BoyWonderz T-shirt. She floored the pedal. The Landcruiser spun away from the torrent of people flooding out from the gates. In the rearview, Oksana saw a helicopter move slowly over the splintered wreckage of the camp to seal off that escape route. She swore under her breath.
Serena watched the blood drip from her fist into the footwell. She said, ‘Stig’s dead. I saw him. I saw his hand. I touched his hand.’
‘They’re all dead. They want to kill everyone. They don’t care. They want everyone dead.’
Oksana wrestled the big white Toyota over the ruts on to the road west. She pushed it up to ninety.
‘Come on come on come on you bitch.’
‘Where’s Ngueme?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’
‘And that American woman. Where is she?’
‘She’s fucking dead. They’re all fucking dead. Don’t you understand?’ Glance again in the rearview. The helicopters were moving over Soroti like monstrous mosquitoes, greedy for blood they dare not touch. Food too rich for machines. Every few seconds one would casually, almost indolently, let off a missile.
Glance at Serena. God, the kid is out of it. Eyes of lead. The shakes are going to start soon. You’re surprised? She was in there. Jesus and Mary, this road was never this long coming in.
‘If we can get to the plane we’ll be all right.’
‘All right?’
‘If we can get airborne, we can outrun them. We’ll be all right.’
‘Airborne?’
Glance in the mirror again. The helicopters were widening their circle. Don’t see me. Kill someone else. Kill some poor fucker refugee family, kill them all, blow them into rags, but don’t kill me.
‘Jesus and Mary God! How did they find out? We were tight, I know it. Who told them?’
‘Told them?’
‘The Buganda Royal Army, girl. The fucking kings and princes. In their mother-fucking American Kiowa attack helicopters.’
‘Americans?’
‘Oh Christ.’
The words were too banal to pierce Serena’s shock. It was the flat tone of inevitability that made her look up from the slow drip of her blood on to the rubber mats. Hunted things run down by the pack, had they voices, would speak like that at the end. She looked behind Oksana’s eyes, saw what she saw in the mirror: the helicopter dip away from the others and swoop after them.
‘Can we beat it?’
‘We can.’ But as she said it, Oksana knew that they could not. It was too fast, too certain. Already it had covered half the distance between camp and car. Svyatiy was too far. She glanced at Serena: do you see behind my eyes, do you listen behind my ears, do you hear the lie in my head?
Yes.
The helicopter was closing fast, nose down, tail high.
Then you know what I am going to do.
Oksana had noticed the dry river cut on the drive in, the hollow rumble of the wheels over the concrete culvert. She slammed the Landcruiser to a halt.
‘Out.’
‘What?’
Jesus and Mary, they were fast. No time to argue. Oksana leaned across Serena and opened the door.
‘Go. Get out. Listen, Ren, the code is “Oh Holy One, preserve us now, and in the hour of our death”. The plane will fly itself. Go.’
‘Okya…’
Serena found herself sprawling on dirt. She scrambled to her feet but the Landcruiser was gone, plunging across country in a high, proud plume of dust. Follow me, fuckers. Here I go.
‘Okya!’ Serena screamed, a big bare target in the middle of the plain dirt road. The helicopter. It was on top of her. She tumbled down into the dry river bed, crawled into the culvert. Culverted things fled from her. She pressed herself to the earth. The helicopter passed over in a thunder of wings. The ground shook. Serena scrabbled out the far side of the ditch, ran up on to the road.
‘Okya!’ she cried a third time.
Swearing and blessing by all her holy ones, Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina drove the Landcruiser like a crazy shamanka, out of her head among the twenty-seven heavens.
‘Come and get me you fucking fucks!’ she shouted at the purple blood-bloated thing hovering in her mirrors. She threw the ’cruiser left, right: the helicopter dodged and weaved behind her, never sure enough to kill, never quite lost.
‘Enough, all right? Enough!’ she yelled. A touch of the brake pedal. Oksana Telyanina baled out. The ground hit her harder than she had ever been hit in her life. She rolled, she bounced, things cracked, pieces of her broke and bled. She screamed, she yelled as the Landcruiser plunged onwards. Moments. She only had moments. She fought herself to her feet. Hurt bad. Hurt very bad. Very broken, but she could manage a run.
There was a big shade tree in front of her. It stood apart from a small wood. It was not a baobab, it was not the tree where man was born, but she knew if she could reach it, she would be all right. Forests were her element. It would take her under its branches. It was the tree that was greater than the tree where man was born. It was the world-tree, the universe herself. She ran towards that tree. The tree was all she could see. The tree was all that mattered. Not the swelling howl of Pratt and Whitney turboshafts. Not the prickle of presence in the back of her head that she knew was Serena, unable to leave her.
‘Get out of my head!’
No time for goodbyes. The tree was all.
Dust swirled up from the earth around her. Oksana dragged herself towards the healing tree. The engine sound rose to a crescendo, and held.
Oksana Mikhailovna stopped. She turned to face the hovering helicopter.
‘Do it!’ she yelled.
Serena crouched at the lip of the dry river. Every fibre in her needed to run, linked to Oksana’s hopeless flight. She did not. She dared not. But she could not break the link. She could not look away. She saw the hovering helicopter. She saw the short line of fire leap out from under the wing of the Kiowa. She saw the bright flash, and the woman’s body leap and jerk into a puppet of red flesh, and the puppet explode into a crimson spray as the leaves and branches of the lone tree whirled up in a sudden storm.
She saw the white light, and the bottomless dark beyond.
The helicopter reared up, banked hard and flew away into the north.
AK47 Hour
43
There were five things in the porcelain jar: a small leather sack of herbs, a spirit catcher from a bedroom window, a pebble of black volcanic glass, the seeds of five trees, a toy plastic aeroplane. They were not the remains of Oksana Telyanina. Nothing remained of Oksana Telyanina.
Being African, and familiar with death, the drinking friends put the jar in the hole and quickly threw in the earth. It was a short job. Kipsang the barman patted the ground flat with the back of the shovel. No one spoke on the run-off where the Gichichi road turned down into the valley of Murang’a. No one laid flowers or read poems or pieces of scripture. No one eulogized. There was nothing to eulogize.
A bus passed, slowly grinding down the dog-legs to the valley below. The passengers stared at the brief vision materializing out of the fog, the black and white figures at the side of the road. Then they were gone. The bus braked to make way for a fast car that suddenly loomed in front of it, headlights blazing. Car and bus grazed past each other. The car drove up the line of official Harambee vehicles and the taxi that had brought the people from the bar. It stopped just above the off-run. Two women and a man got out. One woman was dressed in a long rubber raincape, the other in a black leather trench-coat. The man wore a white jellaba and flip-up shades. He was barefoot. The women remained by the car; the man, without speaking, walked to the fresh turned earth, knelt down and touched his hand to the bare soil. Then he stood up, bowed slightly to the people gathered there and went back to the car. It turned a little up the road and came back down. Its headlights swept across the funeral party.
The party was breaking up. The bar folk were shaking hands with the airfield people and going back to their cars and taxis. Faraway shivered.
‘Come on, Gaby. We should go.’
‘In a minute. I have to talk to Serena.’
Have to. Don’t want to. Afraid to. They had held to their sides of the circle while the people from Kipsang’s Bar dug the hole, Gaby from fear, Serena from anger.
‘Serena…’
Serena seized Gaby’s hands, turned them over, wrists up.
‘So, where is it then? Here?’ She stabbed three fingers into Gaby’s breast bone. ‘Here?’ The fingers lunged for the hollow of the throat. Gaby caught the hand, held it, let it go.
You are too much my daughter, she thought. I pity any man you ever have, because you are your most beautiful in anger. You are absolutely stunning. And then she thought, men, and, since when did you become a woman? Gaby said, ‘It’s just me. Nothing helping me. No chemicals. No patches. I don’t do them any more.’
‘You said that before.’
‘It’s true. Really.’
‘You said that before too.’
Serena shook her head, turned to go to the Harambee car where Sarah waited. Tembo’s daughter, Gaby thought. What is it that ties us together, that pulls us together however far we travel, and kills us?
‘He’s gone, Serena. I threw him out.’
She paused, but did not turn. You are going to make me say it, Gaby thought. You are going to make me humiliate myself at my friend’s funeral. All right. If that’s what you need.
‘He was cheating, he was sleeping around. But that wasn’t why I threw him out, Serena. I always knew he had other women, right from the start.’
‘Other women,’ Serena said. ‘Like me.’
Gaby grimaced.
‘He was sleeping with Sudha. But it was more than that. Ren, he was hurting her. Do you understand me? He was hurting her, like he hurt me. And you. Do you understand why he had to go? They had the hurting.’
Serena whirled and Gaby realized that what she had seen before had not been anger.
‘She’s dead!’
‘Yes. Serena, you are not the only one hurts here, you know? You are not the only one who has lost someone you loved. I loved her. She was my…my soul.’
‘She was my mother!’
‘Serena, no.’
‘You should have died; it was your place, your time and she took it. It should have been you. She should have had a million tomorrows, and now she has none, because of you.’
‘Serena…’
She was running for the car.
‘Yes!’ Gaby shouted at her back. ‘She should have! I should have! I wish I had!’
Serena got into the white car. Sarah shrugged, shook her head. Doors slammed. They were gone.
‘Jesus, I should have. Can’t she hear that? I should have.’
‘Give her time. She doesn’t understand it. You didn’t see her when the plane brought her back to Nyerere. She felt her die, through the link. It was like her dying herself. And she has nothing to mourn, not even bones or ashes. Nothing. She is very young, Gab.’
‘I thought, maybe…’
‘Come on. There is nothing for you up here, and it is cold and miserable.’
In the car, Faraway offered her a silver flask. Gaby sniffed at the open neck. Arak perfume stung the back of her nose. She took a deep swallow. It burned deep, but it was not the water of life.
‘Faraway, about, you know, earlier. I’m sorry.’
She had been glad they had sent an airship. It had given her time to try and put all the broken things in order. But when she saw it settle on the same headland as that other Harambee ship, the panic had struck: what if it’s him? What if he’s come in person to tell me he’s sorry? Too soon to face him, after everything. She had almost chickened. Then she had thought, what is it worth, finally banishing the man and memory of Diamond Jim, if you are going to sit like a frightened chicken, unable to face the world? That had given her the courage to carry her bag up the loading ramp and meet whoever was at the top of it. Who had been a politely sombre political kid who, she could smell, had no notion of death.
The young never think they can die.
She had stood by the window and watched the many-coloured lands of the Harambee scroll under her and seen another landscape: the tree-scattered savannah, the dust of moving animals, the cloud peeling back from Kibo, the snows of Kilimanjaro revealed. It had been Oksana’s plane that had flown her back from Tsavo West, that first time, when Shepard had taken her up and shown her another world. Another world that was now this world. She saw another dusty plain, marked with white lines, goalposts at either end; Oksana Mikhailovna in her borrowed Team SkyNet shirt and boots and denim cut-offs over green cycle shorts, arguing herself into a yellow card. She saw the Antonovs lined up on Wilson airfield, and the Sibirsk pilots conga-ing between them, singing ‘Consider Yourself’ from Oliver. She saw the bar in the PanAfric hotel, and this-year’s-model Out of Africa look clinking Tuskers with Siberian shamanka lesbian chic. Both of them bluffing. Both of them virgins. She thought of Oksana’s need for nation, for lives to keep her warm and tell her she existed. She thought of her bottomless capacity for sensation. She thought of the woman’s ferocious lust, unfulfilled.
‘Big cocks and vodka,’ she had said, and closed her eyes and expected tears. They disappointed her.
That was why, when she saw him waiting for her on the field, she ran to him and beat him on the chest, shoulders, arms, belly with her fists. Pounded him. Hammered him, with the same strength she had summoned to drive Diamond Jim out of the Sea House, along the lanes of Turangalila, on to the main road north, south, anywhere but here.
‘You killed her!’ she shouted into Faraway’s face. ‘You knew the Bugandans knew, you sent her to her death.’
He let her hurt him until her strength ebbed enough for him to grasp her wrists and stop her.
It was over and the discreet security men were moving out of the cover of the fog to their cars. Faraway said, ‘Driver, take us home.’
Gaby looked out at the grey cloud, now eddying, thinning as the car dropped down the Gichichi road. Through rents she glimpsed the villages of the valley, the Chaga dark and lugubrious under the unseasonable overcast. Other world. My world.
‘Faraway, that question.’
‘What question?’
‘The one Okya answered for me. It won’t go away.’
The car was lean and powerful, it took the sharp bends as smoothly and sleekly as a speedskater.
‘Gaby, I do not think this is the right time to be making a decision like that.’
‘It is. I’d be making it even if…if she hadn’t died. I think I’d already made it. This just…just sealed it. Put the sign on it. Does your offer still stand?’
‘It does, if you want it.’
‘I want it. I want it because I want my daughter never to look at me again like she looked at me over that grave. Do I have to tell you more?’
‘You did not even have to tell me that.’
They came out of the clouds into the rain-dirty valley. A steady downpour was dropping out of the heavy cloud. The people abroad on the road huddled under umbrellas and plastic sheets as they kicked through the streams of dirt-red runoff.
‘Faraway, I’m going to need your help with something.’
‘What is it?’
‘Did you hear what I said to Serena, about the, uh…’
‘That you don’t use the patches any more.’
‘Yes. But.’
‘But you’re not over them.’
Gaby looked at the rain.
‘No. You’ve seen…’
‘I know. I know people who can help.’
‘Whatever it takes, Faraway.’
‘It will be bad.’
‘I’m supposed to say that.’
‘Gaby, you’ve said enough for one day.’
In the front seat, Faraway’s aide sat upright, as if stung. He touched fingers to temple.
‘Boss. BBC World Service.’
Uninvited, Gaby scanned the frequencies. The Oxford-African Swahili was oddly comforting, delivering its measured and weighted vowels from London into her brain. The world is a trustworthy place while the British play Lilibulero at the top of the hour.
The UNHCR had come out.
Faraway was on his mobile. Gaby changed stations, hunting for the FM satellite link. For the first time since the birth of Éa she listened to the voice of SkyNet World News.
‘…UNHCR and United Nations Human Rights Commission have issued a joint statement calling for the demilitarization of the I-Zone, the scaling down of the UN protection force, and the repatriation of displaced persons into the Chaga states,’ the unfamiliar presenter said. It sounded like Distinguished Silver Male speaking. Younger Professional Babe would follow through: ‘The United States and Russia have already condemned the statement and have requested an emergency plenary session of the UN Security Council to repair the sudden enormous rift in international security. However, several members have indicated that they will either abstain or vote against any resolution condemning the UNHCR. For the reactions from the Interdiction Zone to today’s announcement, we go over live to Lisa Kropotkin in Juba, Southern Sudan.’ Who would be windswept and squinting and trying to keep the local kids from waving and grinning into the camera while her Tembo fought with glare and white balance and her Faraway rehearsed the officers in the blue helmets to speak English rather than Military.
