We were led through the palm trees to a mud track, where a battered old Land Rover was parked, camouflaged by fronds and netting. Senegal and Boxer sat in the rear, guarded by about a dozen men, all of whom looked to be armed and – always a bad sign with soldiers – bored. None of their uniforms matched, and they wore an assortment of headgear: helmets, berets, caps and what looked like beach hats. A black metal pole was attached to the front passenger window of the vehicle, holding aloft a radio transmitter, and one of the soldiers held a receiver on his lap, the announcer’s voice leaking out from it in an unbroken stream. We were pushed into the back, and then the jalopy stuttered into life and we started moving slowly down the track.
Pritchard’s dossier had mentioned that Biafra had a guerrilla force. I wondered what Isabelle would have made of them – how they would have fitted with her idea of the Biafrans as utterly powerless victims. Their uniforms and weaponry were tattered and piecemeal, and half of them, I now noticed, seemed to be stoned. But they had crept up on Gunner and me without either of us noticing, and had sprung their trap smoothly and efficiently. With several rifles pointed firmly in my direction, I had little choice but to stay put and watch for an opportunity to escape. I wasn’t all that hopeful it would arrive – I’d faced a similar situation just a few hours ago, when Alebayo’s men had driven me to Port Harcourt under a similar armed guard.
Gunner, Senegal and Boxer were seated near me, all of them staring expressionlessly ahead, lost in their own thoughts. No doubt they were repenting their decision to follow me – if it came down to it, they would probably accuse me of kidnapping them or some such story. I wasn’t sure what my own story should be. My thinking was impaired, by pain, fatigue, hunger, thirst – and the nagging thought that I might lose my hearing again. The smell of the marijuana was making me even woozier, and I hadn’t stopped sweating since leaving the Shell camp. Every so often, my guts gave a sudden lurch, and vomit would rise in my throat.
After a few minutes, I decided I might as well try to make an opening, and asked the soldiers seated on the bench opposite me where we were going. ‘I’m ill, and I need to see a doctor. Are we anywhere near Udi? There’s a hospital there.’
They stared right through me.
‘If you don’t shut your mouth, old man, you will soon be much more ill,’ said one.
That drew our cosy little chat to an end, and I concentrated on trying to keep my innards on an even keel instead. We bumped along the track for over an hour, past glittering lagoons and mangrove swamps, all the while rending the night air with the commentary from Radio Biafra. My ears pricked up as the announcer mentioned ‘perfidious Albion’ and, sure enough, he began to discuss the Prime Minister’s impending visit. I couldn’t follow it all due to the noise of the engine and a squabble that had started between two of the men near me, but the thrust seemed to be that the visit was a gimmick designed to deflect the world’s media from a sudden and brutal attack by the Nigerians.
Twenty minutes later, we stopped. The radio was switched off, and the man in the passenger seat took out a walkie-talkie and spoke rapidly into it in his language. There was a pause, followed by a reply through a sea of static. After ten long minutes of this, we started up again, but at an even slower pace. Then I caught some movement a couple of hundred yards down the path: a cluster of men in camouflage were stepping out from the long grass. As we approached, I saw that they held bottles of beer and machine guns and that they were manning a checkpoint, which consisted of a bamboo pole across the path. Simple, but effective. We slowed and our driver leaned out of the window and handed over our papers, talking rapidly in the local language. They inspected them sullenly, then waved us through and trudged back into the long grass.
We passed several such checkpoints, each following more or less the same procedure. Finally, we reached a line of hardwood trees, some of which had been felled and used to create a crude gate. Documents were once more handed over and inspected, the gate was opened and we drove down a slightly larger laterite road.
This move was apparently unforeseen, because several of the men suddenly erupted angrily. Through the din, I figured out that they were urging the driver to take another route, but he was adamant that he knew what he was doing and would reach the destination in plenty of time. This assurance was greeted by derision and much pointing at watches. I looked at mine – it was a quarter to midnight. The captain in the passenger seat, who seemed to be in charge, quickly intervened, telling everyone to stop panicking and let the man do his job; as a compromise, he also chivvied the driver along, telling him to put his foot down. This forced us too fast over the next bump in the road and we all went flying, much to the driver’s delight.
About ten minutes later, we came to a wide village square, which looked like it had once been the site of a marketplace. Unlike Aba, there were functioning cars parked on the street and strips of red, black and green cloth tied around the trunks of trees and pinned to some of the buildings: Biafran flags. We drove onto a wider road that proved to be even bumpier than the one we’d been on, until we came to a standstill in front of a large, squat building, which I guessed had been the town hall or something similar. A gruesome poster pinned to the entrance advised residents how to deal with Nigerian paratroopers: ‘Stake all open fields… leave skull-bashing to women… stab them to death…’
The atmosphere among the men had changed since they had decided to trust the driver’s timekeeping: there had been the usual end-of-journey banter and stretching of limbs, but from the tone of their voices there also seemed to be tension in the air. Were they worried they would receive a dressing down from their commanding officer, perhaps?
I was prodded out of the vehicle along with the others, and the captain ordered a quick piss break – or ‘pause for bodily relief’ as he put it. Once that had been taken care of – and even at gunpoint, it was a mighty relief – the captain pushed open the door of the building, and we all filed in after him. I checked my watch again: it was exactly midnight.
The hall was empty and silent, with no seating and just a bare stone floor, although I could see some marks where heavy objects had previously been placed. The windows were all boarded up and there was an acrid smell I couldn’t identify – something burning?
The door clicked shut behind me, and then the lights went out, plunging us into total darkness. As my eyes tried to adjust, my scalp wriggled with incipient fear. I could hear the fast, shallow breathing of the men around me: they were scared, too. So what the hell were we doing here?
‘You have come.’
The voice erupted from nowhere, and resonated in my skull. It was male, booming, commanding. A few of the men started mumbling responses, but the voice quietened them.
‘Please be seated.’
Groping in the dark, I lowered myself to the floor with the others.
‘Now listen,’ said the voice from out of the darkness. ‘Listen.’
After a few seconds, it began to speak again, but it was now talking in an African language, and the tone was completely flat, with equal stress on all syllables. An incantation of some sort? For the first few seconds, it seemed almost comical, like something out of a Rider Haggard story. But as the voice droned on, the words merging into one endless stream of sound, it started to gather force. Although I didn’t understand a word of it, part of my mind began to enter the stream and try to decipher or imagine meanings, until I was drifting along, my eyes half-glazed, my face covered in cooling sweat, transfixed by this eerie, disconnected chant. The voice seemed to be talking to me about events in my past. Yes, that was right – Anna. I remembered now. That day she kissed me back. All the world blazing in light – the future stretching ahead of us. No war now. Home to England. ‘What will you do in England?’ she had asked me. ‘What will you do now the great dragon has been slain?’ And then the direction of the voice shifted a little, and I could see myself running into the clinic, the Russian soldiers, her body on the stretcher, the red wound and the closed lids. But her face wasn’t her own, it was Isabelle’s and at this horrific realization the floor started shaking and I looked up and the ceiling was, too, and there was light up there, light coming from the ceiling, three sources of light, and as they came closer, drifting down, I saw that they were in the shape of bodies – that they were bodies, in fact, humans in light form, and they reached the ground and one of them leaned in, and he had a strong face, a strong African face, and he asked me what my troubles were and I started crying because I couldn’t tell him, I couldn’t tell him all the troubles I had because I didn’t know where to begin and he took me by the arm and told me it was all right, it would be all right in a little while, but I couldn’t stop crying and it was taking me over, I was heaving and my lungs were on fire, and I couldn’t get the next breath out to tell him, let go of me, don’t hold me, I can’t breathe, my back, hit my back, I can’t breathe, let me breathe, help me breathe…
*
It was so warm in Germany, you see. I hadn’t been used to the warmth, and it had taken me some time to get used to it again. A beautiful day for vengeance. But his neck, sweating. Sweating in the sun. I was unable, I had been unable… The wound had been warm, and there had been something comforting about that. No more ice. No more snow. Just a seeping warmth…
Sound.
It jolted through me.
What was it? A stream?
No, not that. Listen.
Animals! Geese, perhaps?
No, there was more to it, it was deeper. Listen again, closer this time.
Voices. That was it. Human voices. Criss-crossing. Now changing pitch, moving deeper. Singing. They lifted, somehow, and I felt myself carried away with them, on a tide… Not of water. Why was I thinking of snow? The voices seemed to be drifting down like snow, drawing me into their drift. And yet I was warm. Hot, even. Strange to have snow while I sat here sweating.
But there was a breeze. Hadn’t there been a breeze just now? Yes, there it was again. It felt so good. It was almost as if I could follow every atom of it wafting across my face. Now it had reached the bridge of my nose, now onto my cheek. And then it had gone again. Why? How can it have gone like that? Now I felt drier than I did before. Wait. Here it came again…
I opened my eyes. A man wearing a white mask was waving something at me.
A banana leaf. So that was the breeze. Yes, keep waving it, I wanted to say to him. Give it to me. Let me wave it! He didn’t. Instead he stopped waving. I could see the sides of some glasses frames through the peepholes of the mask, and behind the lenses lay dark watchful eyes. The man stood suddenly and moved away from me, out of my line of vision. The singing stopped abruptly, and as it did I placed the song. The snow falling outside on the black cars. The sky darkening. Cocktails at the consulate in Helsinki, all those years ago.
I was a long way from Helsinki. I tried to sit up, but all I caught was a glimpse of the man walking away, and the room I was in. It was very narrow and low-ceilinged. The walls were white and made of some kind of stucco or wattle, propped up with logs. The man was wearing a thin white coat, and there were shelves attached to the walls with small glass objects on them.
I felt dizzy with the effort so I closed my eyes again and tried to imagine the breeze washing over my face. It didn’t come, but instead a cool wetness spilled over my lips, and I opened my eyes to see the man with the mask standing over me, his arm outstretched, a white cup pressed against my mouth. As with the sitting up, the fresh experience made me aware of the old one, and I could taste vomit, and it all came back. The hall. The voice. The bodies made of light.
‘Good morning,’ said the man. His voice was a little muffled by the mask. I couldn’t place his accent – possibly American – but he was black; I had seen a strip of arm between a sleeve and glove.
He stood and raised his arms above me. I tilted my head and saw that he was adjusting some kind of a tube – I followed it and saw that it entered my arm.
‘Where am I?’ I said, and was surprised at the effort it took.
‘You are in a clinic run by the Red Cross,’ he said. ‘You are very ill.’
A clinic. Of course it was a clinic – the tubes. That smell. Those objects on the shelves were bottles, I now saw. ‘The Red Cross’. That phrase was also familiar. It meant something. More than what it normally meant. It was connected with something. Like a player of patience, I racked my brains to match the pair.
‘“Finlandia”,’ I said, remembering another piece of the puzzle. ‘I heard a choir singing “Finlandia”.’
He nodded. ‘The Biafrans have taken it as their national anthem. They often play it on the radio.’
A string of pairs suddenly matched up.
‘Udi,’ I said. ‘Are we in Udi?’
The glove stopped the calibration of the tube, and the mask looked down at me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But we aren’t too far away.’
‘I need to get there.’
The mask nodded in understanding, while the gloves went back to their task. ‘You need to recover first,’ he said. ‘You’re very ill.’
‘Malaria?’
The doctor finished his work and then sat down in the chair he had been fanning me from earlier.
‘That’s what we thought at first,’ he said. ‘But now we’re not so sure. Do you feel you can talk?’
I nodded, and he took out a pad of paper and a pen from his coat.
‘When did you arrive in Nigeria?’ he asked.
It took me a few moments. ‘Monday,’ I said. ‘Monday evening.’
‘March 24th?’
‘Yes.’
He wrote it down, adjusting his peepholes a little to make it easier. ‘Have you taken any anti-malarial medication since arriving?’
I started to shake my head, but suddenly remembered the pills Manning had given me on the way back from the airport. ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Yes, I have!’
The eyes in the mask stared back at me. ‘How did you take it?’
‘What do you mean? Swallowed it, of course. A glass of water in my hotel…’
‘From the faucet – the tap?’
‘Yes,’ I said, hollowly. ‘From the tap.’
Silence, as his pen scratched the paper. My muscles ached; my innards gurgled; my head throbbed. Was it neon they were using for the light in here?
‘Have you had any other contact with unfiltered water since you arrived? Have you been in any areas containing swamps, for example?’
Only waded through one. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him, so I just nodded. He scribbled it down.
‘Have you been in contact with any rodents since you arrived in Nigeria?’ he asked, not looking up.
I stared at him and nodded. Of course. The rat in the sink. The same sink from which I had poured the water to wash down Manning’s useless bloody malaria tablet.
‘What do you think it is?’
‘We’re not sure,’ he said. ‘We’ve tested you for everything we could think of: malaria, typhoid fever, trichinosis… None of them fitted. Another candidate is yellow fever, but you don’t look jaundiced and if you arrived Monday the incubation is still a little too fast. It could be a new disease: there was one discovered a couple of hundred miles north of here in January, in a village called Lassa. An American nurse in a missionary hospital fell sick very quickly. Then one of the nurses treating her caught it. Nobody’s sure how it’s transmitted yet, but one possibility is via rodent faeces. From monitoring you and talking to others, you seem to have had some of the same symptoms as the nurses: muscle and back pain, fever, nausea… Have you had any retro-orbital pain?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Behind the eyes.’
I nodded.
‘That’s another.’ He looked down at his pad. ‘Also intermittent loss of hearing, respiratory problems, hallucinations…’
His outfit was starting to take on a significance I didn’t like. ‘What happened to the nurses?’ I asked.
‘They died,’ he said evenly. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. That disease has only just been discovered, and we’re by no means certain you’ve contracted it. It’s just an idea. We’ve been giving you hydroxychloroquine and tetracycline, and now I am starting you on chloramphenicol. We’re doing everything we can. In the meantime, I’d be very grateful if you could make a list of all the people you have come into contact with since arriving in Nigeria. We may need to start tracing them.’
I asked him how I had arrived at the clinic, and there was a conspicuous pause before he answered. ‘Some Biafran soldiers brought you in. They said they had been at a meeting with Doctor Wise when you had collapsed.’
‘Doctor who?’
‘Wise. He’s a well-known spiritualist in these parts. Many of the Biafrans are devotees of his – some of the soldiers insist that he has the final say on whether to go ahead with military manoeuvres.’ The white cotton shoulders shrugged. ‘It’s crazy, of course. They think he can invoke spirits from the sky.’
It didn’t sound so crazy to me. As he had been talking, I had managed to raise my head enough to have another look at the room. There was something I didn’t like about it – there were no doors, just a flight of steps.
‘Where are the doors?’ I said. ‘And why are there no windows?’
The doctor shifted a little in his chair. ‘Because we are underground. This is usually a theatre for emergency operations, but we’ve converted it into an isolation ward to treat you.’
I looked around at the dank walls and low ceiling. The prognosis didn’t look too good – I had already been buried.
The doctor closed his pad, placed the top back on his pen and placed them both back in his coat. ‘Even though your fever has subsided somewhat, you are still in a critical condition,’ he said, pushing his chair back and standing. ‘I’ll be back to check on you later. In the meantime, you have a visitor.’
As if on cue, there was a clanging sound and I looked towards the end of the room, at the staircase. Black boots tucked into khaki trousers appeared, followed by stocky legs, a stockier torso and, finally, the head of an African man with a bushy beard.
He walked over and nodded to the doctor, who turned to a trestle and picked up a white coat lying there. The newcomer carefully placed this over his uniform – it was a little tight on his shoulders. The doctor offered him a mask, but he shook his head and said something I couldn’t catch. The doctor nodded and walked away, disappearing up the staircase.
The African approached my bed and leaned over me. I had never met him before, but I knew who he was.
‘Hello, Mister Kane,’ he said in a deep, velvety voice. ‘Welcome to Biafra.’