The Songlines

  The Governor, a morose hypochondriac, had been longing for someone to share the memory of his student days in Paris, or to argue doctrinal points of la pensée maotsetungienne. His favourite words were tactique and technique, but whenever I raised the question of the Nemadi, he’d let fly a brittle laugh and murmur, ‘It is forbidden.’

  At mealtimes, a pink-fingered lutanist would serenade us through the couscous while the Governor reconstructed, with my prompting, a street map of the Quartier Latin. From his palace – if four mud-brick rooms were a palace – I could see a tiny white tent of the Nemadi beckoning me across the hillside.

  ‘But why do you wish to see these people?’ the Governor shouted at me. ‘Walata, yes! Walata is a historical place. But this Nemadi is nothing. It is a dirty people.’

  Not only were they dirty, they were a national disgrace. They were infidels, idiots, thieves, parasites, liars. They ate forbidden food.

  ‘And their women’, he added, ‘are prostitutes!’

  ‘But beautiful?’ I suggested, if only to annoy him.

  His hand shot out from the folds of his blue robes.

  ‘Ha!’ he wagged a finger at me. ‘Now I know! Now I see it! But let me tell you, young Englishman, those women have terrible diseases. Incurable diseases!’

  ‘That’s not what I heard,’ I said.

  On our third evening together, having browbeaten him with the name of the Minister of the Interior, I saw signs he was beginning to relent. At lunch the day after, he said I was free to go, providing I was accompanied by a policeman, and providing I did nothing which might encourage them to hunt.

  ‘They must not hunt,’ he bellowed. ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘I do hear you,’ I said. ‘But they are hunters. They were hunting before the time of the Prophet. What else can they do but hunt?’

  ‘Hunting’, he folded his fingers sententiously, ‘is forbidden by the law of our Republic.’

  A few weeks earlier, as I was rooting through the literature on Sahara nomads, I had come across an account of the Nemadi, based on the findings of a Swiss ethnologist, which classed them ‘among the most destitute people on earth’.

  They were thought to number about three hundred and they would wander, in bands of thirty or so, along the edge of El Djouf, the Saharan Empty Quarter. The report gave them fair skin and blue eyes and assigned them to the eighth and lowest grade of Moorish society, ‘Outcasts of the Wilderness’: lower than the Harratin, who were tied, black, agricultural slaves.

  The Nemadi professed neither food taboos nor reverence for Islam. They ate locusts and wild honey, and wild boar if they got the chance. They sometimes earned a pittance from the nomads by selling tichtar, the dried meat of antelopes which, when crumbled, gives a gamey flavour to couscous.

  The men earned a little more money carving saddle-trees and milk-bowls from acacia wood. They insisted they were the rightful owners of the land, and that the Moors had stolen it from them. Because the Moors treated them as pariahs, they were forced to camp far from the town.

  As for their origins, they were possibly survivors of a Mesolithic hunting population. Almost certainly, they were the ‘Messoufites’, one of whom – blind in one eye, half blind in the other – guided Ib’n Battūta across the sands in 1357. ‘The desert here’, wrote the world traveller, ‘is beautiful and brilliant, and the soul finds its ease. Antelopes abound. A herd often passes so close to our caravan that the Messoufites hunt them with arrows and with dogs.’

  By the 1970s, shooting parties with Land-Rovers and long-range rifles had made sure that the oryx and addax, far from being abundant, were dying out. The government called for a general ban on hunting, in which the Nemadi were included.

  Knowing themselves to be as gentle as the Moors were violent and vindictive; knowing also that it was herding which led to violence, the Nemadi wanted none of it. Their favourite songs spoke of flights into the desert where they would wait for better times.

  The Governor told me how he and his colleagues had bought the Nemadi a total of a thousand goats. ‘One thousand goats!’ he went on shouting. ‘You know what that means? Many goats! And what did they do with those goats? Milk them? No! Ate them! Ate the lot! Ils sont im-bé-ciles!’

  The policeman, I’m glad to say, liked the Nemadi. He said they were braves gens and, surreptitiously, that the Governor was off his head.

  Walking towards the white tent, we first heard the sound of laughter and then came on a party of twelve Nemadi, adults and children, resting in the shade of an acacia. They were none of them sick or dirty. Everyone was immaculate.

  The headman got up to welcome us.

  ‘Mahfould,’ I said, and shook his hand.

  I knew his face from the Swiss ethnographer’s photos: a flat, beaming face wound about with a cornflower-blue turban. He had hardly aged in twenty years.

  Among the party were several women in indigo cotton and a negro with a club foot. There was an ancient, blue-eyed cripple who manoeuvred himself on his hands. The chief hunter was a square-shouldered man whose expression spoke of rigour and reckless gaiety. He was whittling a saddle-tree from a block of wood while his favourite dog, a sleek piebald terrier not unlike a Jack Russell, nuzzled up against his knee.

  Nemadi means ‘master of dogs’. The dogs are said to eat even when their owners go hungry; their training would be the pride of any circus. A pack consists of five: the ‘king’ and four followers.

  The hunter, having tracked a herd of antelopes to its grazing ground, will lie with his dogs on the downward scarp of a dune, and instruct them which animal to go for. At a signal, the ‘king’ then hurtles down the slope, fastens its teeth around the antelope’s muzzle, and the others go for each of the legs. A single knife thrust, a rapid prayer to ask the antelope for its forgiveness – and the hunt is over.

  The Nemadi despise the use of firearms as a sacrilege. And since the soul of the dead beast is thought to reside in its bones, these are reverently buried in case the dogs defile them.

  ‘The antelopes were our friends,’ said one of the women with a dazzling white smile. ‘Now they have gone far away. Now we have nothing, nothing to do but laugh.’

  They all roared with laughter when I asked about the Governor’s goats.

  ‘And if you will buy us a goat,’ said the chief hunter, ‘we will kill that also, and eat it.’

  ‘Right,’ I said to the policeman. ‘Let’s go and buy them a goat.’

  We walked across the wadi to where a herdsman was watering his flock. I paid a little more than he asked for a yearling, and the hunter coaxed it back to the camp. A gurgle from behind a bush announced that its life had ended and there would be meat for supper.

  The women laughed, beat a tam-tam on some old tin basins, and sang a soft burbling song to thank the foreigner for the gift of meat.

  There is a story of a Moorish emir, who, driven to frenzy by a Nemadi woman’s smile, kidnapped her, clothed her in silks and never saw her smile again until the day she spotted, through the lattice of her prison, a Nemadi man strolling through the market. To the emir’s credit, he let her go.

  What, I asked the women, was the secret of their famous smile?

  ‘Meat!’ they cried cheerfully, gnashing their teeth in unison. ‘Meat is what gives us our beautiful smiles. We chew the meat and we cannot help smiling.’

  In the little white tent, sewn from strips of Sudanese cotton, there lived an old woman with two dogs and a cat. Her name was Lemina. She was very old when the Swiss came nearly twenty years earlier. The policeman said she was more than a hundred.

  Tall and unstooping, in blue, she came through the thorn trees towards the cause of the excitement.

  Mahfould stood to greet her. She was deaf and dumb. They stood against the deepening sky, flicking their fingers in sign language. Her skin was white, like sheets of tissue paper. Her eyes were hooded and cloudy. Smiling, she raised her withered arms towards me and uttered a succession of warbling notes.

 
She held the smile a full three minutes. Then she turned on her heels, snapped a twig from an acacia, and went back to her tent.

  Among these pale-skinned people, the negro was the odd man out. I asked how he had come to join the band.

  ‘He was alone,’ said Mahfould. ‘So he came with us.’

  I then learned, through the policeman, that it was possible for a man to join the Nemadi: a woman never. Yet, since their numbers were so low, and since no self-respecting outsider would demean himself by ‘marrying down’, these women always had their eyes open for ‘fresh white blood’.

  One of the young mothers, a grave and lovely girl with a cowl of blue cotton over her head, was suckling a baby. She was married to the hunter. You would have said she was about twenty-five: but when I mentioned the name of the Swiss ethnologist, the husband grinned and, gesturing towards his wife, said, ‘We have one of his.’

  He set aside his carpentry and whistled across to the second camp. A minute or two later, a lithe, bronze-skinned young man with glinting green eyes came striding through the bushes with a pair of dogs and a hunting spear. He wore a short leather breech-clout. His hair was fair-to-reddish and cut in a kind of cockscomb. The instant he saw a European, he lowered his eyelids.

  He sat down in silence between his mother and foster-father. Anyone might mistake them for the Holy Family.

  When I came to the end of the story, Arkady made no comment, but stood up and said, ‘We’d better get going.’ We buried the debris and walked back to the car.

  ‘You may think it sounds silly,’ I said, trying to pump him for a reaction. ‘But I live with that old woman’s smile.’

  The smile, I said, was like a message from the Golden Age. It had taught me to reject out of hand all arguments for the nastiness of human nature. The idea of returning to an ‘original simplicity’ was not naive or unscientific or out of touch with reality.

  ‘Renunciation’, I said, ‘even at this late date, can work.’

  ‘I’d agree with that,’ said Arkady. ‘The world, if it has a future, has an ascetic future.’

  26

  IN THE POLICE station at Popanji, two Aboriginal girls in dirty floral dresses were standing before the counter swearing oaths before the officer in charge. They needed his official stamp before they could sign on for welfare. They had interrupted his weight-training session.

  He took the hand of the taller girl and pressed it on the Bible.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now repeat what I say, after me. I, Rosie . . .’

  ‘I, Rosie . . .’

  ‘Swear by Almighty God . . .’

  ‘Swear by Almighty God . . .’

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘Now it’s your turn, Myrtle.’

  The policeman reached for the other girl’s hand, but she cringed and whipped it from his grasp.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he said in a wheedling voice. ‘No need to act the giddy-goat.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Myrtle,’ said her sister.

  But Myrtle shook her head vigorously and locked her hands behind her back. Rosie then gently uncurled her sister’s forefinger and tugged it towards the binding.

  ‘I, Myrtle . . .’ said the policeman.

  ‘I, Myrtle . . .’ she repeated, as though the words were going to choke her.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’ll do for you.’

  He stamped their application forms and scrawled a signature across each. On the wall behind, there were pictures of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. Myrtle sucked her thumb and stared, bug-eyed, at the Queen’s diamonds.

  ‘Now what do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Rosie for her sister.

  The girls skipped away, past the flagstaff and across the rain-sodden lawn. It had been raining all day. They splashed on through puddles towards a gang of boys booting at a football.

  The policeman was short, scarlet in the face, with stumpy legs and almost unbelievable muscles. He was dripping with sweat, and his carroty curls were flattened on to his forehead. He wore short, ice-blue leotards with a satiny sheen. His pectoral muscles were so heftily developed that the shoulder-straps had bunched into the cleavage, leaving his nipples bare.

  ‘Hello there, Ark,’ he said.

  ‘Red,’ said Arkady, ‘I want you to meet my friend, Bruce.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Bruce,’ said Red.

  We were standing behind the plate-glass window looking out at the blank horizon. Water lay in sheets on the ground, flooding several Aboriginal humpies to the depth of a foot or more. The owners had heaped their gear on to the roofs. The water was awash with refuse.

  A short way off to the west was the old administrator’s house, of two storeys, which had since been given over to the community. The roof was still on and there were floors and fireplaces. But the walls, the window sashes and the staircase had all been burnt for firewood.

  We looked through this X-ray house into the yellow sunset. On both upper and lower floors sat a ring of dark figures, warming themselves over a smoky fire.

  ‘They don’t give a fuck for walls,’ said Red, ‘but they do like a roof for the rain.’

  Arkady told him we were on our way to Cullen. ‘Little dispute between Titus and the Amadeus Mob.’

  ‘Yes,’ Red nodded. ‘I heard about that.’

  ‘Who’s Titus?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Arkady. ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll be out that way myself next week,’ Red said. ‘Got to go and look for the grader.’

  Clarence Japaljarrayi, the Chairman at Cullen, had borrowed the Popanji grading-machine to make a road from the settlement to a soakage.

  ‘That was nine months ago,’ Red said. ‘Now the fucker says he’s lost it.’

  ‘Lost a grader?’ Arkady laughed. ‘For Christ’s sakes, you can’t lose a grader.’

  ‘Well, if anyone’s going to lose a grader,’ said Red, ‘it’ll be Clarence.’

  Arkady asked what the road was like up ahead. Red toyed with the buckle of his security belt.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Stumpy Jones nearly got bogged in the big storm Thursday. But Rolf and Wendy went through yesterday, and they radioed this morning they’d arrived.’

  He was shifting uneasily from foot to foot. You could tell he was aching to get back to his weights.

  ‘Just one thing,’ said Arkady. ‘You haven’t seen old Stan Tjakamarra? I thought we’d take him along. He’s on quite good terms with Titus.’

  ‘I think Stan’s gone walkabout,’ Red said. ‘They’ve been initiating all week. It’s been a right mess, I can tell you. You ask Lydia.’

  Lydia was one of two school-teachers stationed here. We had radioed a message for her to expect us.

  ‘See you in a while,’ Red said. ‘She’s cooking tonight.’

  The police post at Popanji was a low concrete building divided into three equal parts: a public office, the officer’s private quarters, and the room Red used for weight-training. In the yard at the back there was a gaol.

  The weight-training room had a wall-to-wall window and the weights themselves were the same electric blue as Red’s leotards. We watched him enter. He lay down on the bench-press and gripped the bar. A small boy whistled to his mates, who dropped their football and rushed, naked, to the window, yelling and making funny faces and pressing their noses to the glass.

  ‘One of the sights of the Territory,’ said Arkady.

  ‘I’ll say,’ I said.

  ‘Not a bad bloke, Red,’ he said. ‘Likes a bit of discipline. Speaks Aranda and Pintupi like a native. Bit of a nut-case, really. I’ll give you one guess what his favourite book is.’

  ‘I hate to think.’

  ‘Guess!’

  ‘Pumping Iron,’ I said.

  ‘Way off.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The Ethics of Spinoza.’

  27

  WE FOUND LYDIA in the schoolroom, trying to restore a semblance of order to the papers,
paint pots, plastic alphabets and picture-books that lay scattered over the tables or trampled into the floor by muddy feet. She came to the doorway.

  ‘Oh God,’ she cried. ‘What am I to do?’

  She was a capable and intelligent woman in her early forties: a divorcee with two young boys. Her hair was grey and cut in a fringe above a pair of steady brown eyes. She was so capable and plainly so used to rising above every crisis that she refused to admit, to herself or others, that her nerves were frayed to breaking.

  In the middle of the morning, she had gone to take a radio-call from her mother, who was sick in Melbourne. When she came back, the kids had dipped their hands into a can of green paint and slapped it round the walls.

  ‘Well, at least they didn’t shit on the desks,’ she said. ‘This time!’

  Her boys, Nicky and David, were playing with their black friends in the schoolyard in their underpants, muddied from head to toe, and swinging like monkeys from the aerial roots of a fig tree. Nicky, frantic with excitement, shouted obscenities at his mother and stuck out his tongue.

  ‘I’m going to drown you,’ she shouted back.

  She stretched her arms across the doorway, as though to prevent us from entering, but then said, ‘Come in. Come in. I’m only being silly.’

  She stood in the middle of the room, paralysed by the chaos.

  ‘Let’s have a bonfire,’ she said. ‘The only thing to do’s to have a bonfire and burn the lot. Burn and begin again.’

  Arkady comforted her in the reverberative Russian voice he usually reserved for women, to calm them. Lydia then led us towards a sheet of fibreboard, on which was pinned up the work of the art class.

  ‘The boys paint horses and helicopters,’ she said. ‘But can I get them to do a house? Never! Only girls do houses . . . and flowers.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Arkady.

  ‘Do look at these,’ she smiled. ‘These are funny.’

  They were a pair of crayon drawings, one of an Emu Monster with atrocious claws and beak. The other was a hairy ‘Ape Man’ with a jawful of fangs and flashing yellow eyes, like headlights.

  ‘Where’s Graham?’ Arkady asked, suddenly.