Before dawn on the third morning of their stay in Wadi Halfa, they met, as arranged, their friend Daub Arbab in the lobby of the Nile Hotel. He had flown from Khartoum, where he had collected an order of Novello one-handed chainsaws and 25mm-toothed Sandviken handsaws, used for the most fragile cutting. The shipment had gone astray once and Daub had been sent to oversee its safe delivery. This fell into accord with Daub's own plan, to seize the opportunity to visit Wadi Halfa as many times as possible before the inundation. This time he'd hired a truck to drive Avery and Jean north to the Debeira pipe scheme. Avery wanted to see for himself the canal where the Nubians had set afloat their irrigation pumps on barges. “It is not far,” said Daub, “and on the way back, we will stop to say our sad farewell to the most beautiful place on this earth.”
They drove under the cold stars of dawn, north from Wadi Halfa to the now empty villages of Debeira and Ashkeit.
– In Nubia, said Daub, any dispute that arises is settled by the entire family, including women and children. Violent crimes are extremely rare, but in such a case, an exception would be made and only the men would meet to decide what was to be done. The guilty one would be shunned so completely that he would be forced, for his own survival, to leave the community. Cases are never brought to the police. In this way, Nubia has always protected itself, always kept its independence.
The economy depends on the division of ownership. This is a very satisfactory arrangement of real estate, capital, and labour. But often the distribution of the harvest is a complicated affair – because only the oldest women in the village can remember the tangled terms of the original transaction. These arrangements keep alive the history of each family. They ensure that even the labour exile will maintain his place in the village.
Here is a typical story of Nubia, continued Daub. Two men who shared an eskalay were quarrelling over the division of water. In order to irrigate the land of each man equally, the water had to be channelled from one ditch to the other. They were arguing over who was benefiting from the larger share when their uncle overheard. He arranged for a large stone to be brought and placed in the middle of the canal, separating the water into two streams, thus ending the argument. In 1956, when the hostilities erupted between Egypt and England over the Suez, the Nubians followed the events closely; they hurried back and forth from the field to the village, back and forth to gather around a single shortwave radio. An old man observed this rushing to and fro all morning and at last asked one of the young men what it was all about. ‘Grandfather, the Englishmen are fighting Egypt for the Suez Canal.’ The old man shook his head. ‘Won't anyone put a stone in the middle?’
I will tell you another story, said Daub. My father was hired by the British army to train and serve as a translator. He was very young and very clever. One British officer saw how quick he was and helped him to come to England and to find a job. My father eventually married an Englishwoman. And so I was born and raised in Manchester. I worked very hard, studying for engineering. Then I decided to come to Egypt. My father was unhappy at this but also secretly pleased. He would say, ‘Here in England you have everything, and there …’ he would trail off. There, I knew he was thinking, enviously, was the river and the hills and the desert. And secretly pleased too, because part of every father longs for his own boyhood to be understood by his son.
From a distance Avery and Jean saw that, like other Nubian villages, Ashkeit had been built at the foot of rocky hills and a thick date palm forest grew down to the river.
And from a distance they saw that, like other Nubian houses, the houses of Ashkeit were luminous cubes – both sunlight and moonlight had soaked into the whitewashed walls of sand and mud plaster, smooth and magical as ice that never melts. Just below the roof, small windows were cut in the walls for ventilation – large enough to let in a breeze but small and high enough to keep out the heat and the sand. Each house possessed the wooden door of a fortress, and a one-metre long wooden bolt, which would have held, before the evacuation, a giant wooden key. Behind the impressive entrance, Jean and Avery knew, would be the customary large central courtyard, with rooms leading from it.
Daub stopped a little way from the village. He turned to them. “There is something in both your faces,” he said. “I saw it even the first time we met, that made me wish to bring you here.”
Describe a landscape you love, Jean had asked Avery the first time they'd lain together in her bed on Clarendon Avenue; and he'd whispered the stone forests of his childhood; his grandmother's garden; the field at the end of his cousins' road in the countryside where he'd spent the war – there was a certain place, a fold in the hills that he could not stop looking at, a feeling he could never name, attached to that place.
Jean knew Avery's way of seeing, how he arrived somewhere and made room for it in his heart. He let himself be altered. Jean had felt it the first time they met, and many times since. In the riverbed of the St. Lawrence and in the drowning counties; in Britain, standing in the rain at the edge of the world in Uist trying to name the moment the last molecule of light disappeared from the sky; in the Pennines; on Jura; and when they walked upon the absolute black of Marina's newly ploughed marsh. And when Avery looked at her in the dark, making room for her inside himself.
Now, in Ashkeit, Jean felt the blow, the disaster to a soul that can be caused by beauty, by an answer one cannot grasp with one's hands. The hunger for a home was much worse here, unbearable. For now it was to be found and lost. The village, the way the houses grew out of the desert – it was as if the need of Avery's heart had invented them. And, too, the kinship with those who made them.
The houses were like gardens sprung up in the sand after a rainfall. As if cut by Matisse's scissors, shapes of pure colour – intense and separate – were painted onto the glowing white walls. Designs of cinnamon, rust, phthalocyanine green, rose, antwerp blue, tan, cream, madder, lamp black, sienna, and ancient yellow ochre, perhaps the oldest pigment used by man. Each a shout of joy. Embedded in the whitewashed walls were decoration – designs of brightly coloured lime wash, bright as the eye could bear – geometric patterns, plants, birds and animals – with mosaics set into the plaster like jewels; and snail shells, and polished pebbles. Over the gates were elaborately painted china plates, as many as thirty or forty decorating a single house. They were like stones of a necklace set against the white skin – porous, breathing, cool – of the plaster. Here was human love of place so freely expressed, alive with meaning; houses so perfectly adapted to their context in materials and design that they could never be moved. It was an integrity of art, domestic life, landscape – a beauty before which one did not wish to prostrate oneself, but instead to leap up. When Jean saw the houses of Ashkeit, she understood as never before what Avery meant about knowing builder and building intimately even at first sight. And Jean knew that he would be thinking what she was thinking; that it was Ashkeit they should be salvaging; though it could never exist anywhere else and if moved, would crumble, like a dream.
Avery approached Daub, who was standing alone by the river.
– It will take all my life, said Avery, to learn what I have seen today.
But Jean took Avery's arm and gently led him off, for their friend Daub was weeping.
Jean and Avery waited for Daub at the edge of the village. They sat together in the twilight sand of Ashkeit. The air deepened. For a long moment this light was suspended, like the face of a listener at the precise moment of understanding. And then the new skin of starlight, like ice on water, spread across the sky. How remorselessly the sand turned cold, the surrounding coldness of thousands of kilometres of desert, an endless cold. Avery thought of his schoolteacher in England who had cut an apple and held one-quarter of it up to the class: this is the amount of earth that is not water; and then cut the quarter in half – this is the amount of arable land; and cut again – this is the amount of arable land not covered by human habitation; and finally, the amount of land that feeds everyone on the earth
– barely a scrap of skin.
Like discovering latent knowledge in one's self while reading words on a page, like a shape emerging from sculptor's clay, so arose their feelings of astonishment and inevitability as the village of Ashkeit had come into closer view. It was the same sensation that Avery felt when he first saw Jean, walking alone on the riverbank. Inexplicably, in that moment, he knew the place held meaning, for him and for her, as if his own heart had brought this to pass. As if he had caused the event – then and there. More, as if the place itself had given rise to her.
It was also the knowledge that they would be forever changed, their bodies already changed; attuned to each other.
He could almost imagine that the houses of Ashkeit rose out of the sand at the very moment of his sight, born from the intensity of his desire.
Jean watched as the white shapes of the houses dissolved into the twilight; she thought of the leaf of the sumach, which looks like six separate leaves but which is botanically only a single leaf. So, too, Ashkeit. Jean took Avery's hand. His eyes were closed, but because he felt her hand in his he also saw her hand in his mind. So it was with the houses of Nubia; no landscape alone could arouse such feeling. It was what he felt, looking as a child at that crease of hill in Buckinghamshire, in the fall of light, familiar as a face. This earth, this Jean Shaw.
At that moment he imagined he knew, his body knew, what Ashkeit and Debeira and Faras, all the villages, meant.
When he had sat in the Buckinghamshire hills with his father – though he had said nothing about his feeling for that place – he knew his father had felt it too. How could Avery explain it; it was as if what he experienced there could not have been brought to life anywhere else.
When the water came, the houses would dissolve like a bromide. But they would not even disappear into the river, which held a memory of them. For even the river would be gone.
Daub had come and Jean sat between the two men, between the earth and stars. She thought of the children who had been born in this village and who would never be able to return, never be able to satisfy or explain the nameless feeling that would come upon them, in the midst of their adulthood, perhaps waking from an afternoon sleep, or walking along a road, or upon entering a stranger's house.
– A human being can be destroyed piece by piece, Daub said, looking out at the abandoned village glowing in the sand. Or all at once.
Do you know the beginning of Metamorphoses? asked Daub. ‘Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/into different bodies.’
They began the drive back through the twilight desert to Wadi Halfa.
Avery spoke of the despair of space that the built world had created; waste space too narrow for anything but litter, dark walkways from carparks to the street; the endless, dead space of underground garages; the corridors between skyscrapers; the space surrounding industrial rubbish bins and ventilator shafts … the space we have imprisoned between what we have built, like seeds of futility, small pockets on the earth where no one is meant to be alive, a pause, an emptiness …
Avery imagined a time, not too far distant, when engineers' calculations could be so cleverly manipulated, that materials, tension, stress, and weight-bearing would have a new vocabulary; a time when buildings of such startling shapes would rise from the ground like the sudden eruption of a volcano; a time when bombastic originality would be mistaken for beauty, just as austerity had once been mistaken for authority.
– It is not originality or authority that I desire in a building, said Avery. It is restoration. When you find yourself someplace – he paused. I suppose I mean exactly that – to find myself, in a place.
– We wish our buildings to grow old with us, said Daub.
North of Sarra the road climbed to the top of the hills, and Daub stopped the truck. It was almost dark. Here, from the height, they looked out to the groves of the Nile and beyond, to the great Sahara. Jean suddenly understood that the colours of the limewash at Ashkeit were as startling as the green of the floodplain.
– Soon, said Daub, everything we see here will be under water. There is an illusion of peace. But there is trouble and like much of the trouble in the desert, it is caused both by the living and the dead.
My father had a habit, which I find I have inherited, of clipping articles from the newspapers. He used to form an idea about the world, a theory, and then he would happen upon all kinds of ‘proof’ in the papers – coincidental, of course, but it amused him. And it became a small obsession.
Once, he held up a newspaper photograph of a dark-featured child, her hair wrapped in a scarf or shawl, holding a bundle of cloth.
‘What do you see?’ my father asked me.
‘A DP from the war in Europe?’
‘A Palestinian refugee, 1948.’
He showed me another clipping, very similar to the first.
‘And this?’
‘Another Palestinian boy?’
‘No. A Jewish boy who has arrived in Israel from a refugee camp in Germany. And this?’
He held up a photo of a line of people, weighed down with suitcases and satchels, clearly carrying all they owned.
‘Immigrants to Israel?’
‘No, Arab Jews forced to leave Egypt, also 1948. And this photo – a Polish boy, a Christian, in a camp in Tashkent; and this – a Yugoslav boy in a refugee camp in Kenya; and another in Cyprus; and in the desert camp at El Shatt in 1944; and here, a Greek child in the camp near Gaza, at Nuseirat, also 1944. Quite a few times,’ said my father, ‘I have found faces that are almost identical. These two – one is from a refugee camp in Lebanon; the other, from a refugee camp in Backnang near Stuttgart. When you see just their faces, nothing else, do they not look like twins? That resemblance is what caused me to begin this collection, photos everyone sees every day, from newspapers or magazines, refugees from every side.’
Did you know, said Daub, that the first plans for the High Dam were drawn up by West Germany to appease Egypt, after compensating Israel after the war? There is so much collusion, from every side, it might be possible to sort it out, if only a single soul possessed all the information.
Here I am, a British citizen, whose father was born in Cairo, and whose grandfather died in London in the Blitz, sitting in the Sudanese desert, with a Canadian and her British husband, talking about refugees in Kenya, Gaza, New Zealand, India, Khataba, Indonesia …
Daub rested his head in his arms on the steering wheel. The breeze lifted the hair from the back of his neck and Jean felt a pang at the sight; a place of vulnerability. One could live a lifetime, she thought, and perhaps never be touched there.
– I was in Faras during the first evacuation. I was working in Halfa then, said Daub, and I went to witness it. I saw a mother and daughter saying their farewells. They had lived in two villages that were side by side, a short walk from each other. The daughter had moved to live with her husband's family when they were married, but the mother and daughter saw each other very often, just a walk of short distance between the two villages. However, the villages happened to be on either side of the border between Sudan and Egypt, that invisible border in the middle of the desert, and so now the mother was being moved to Khashm el Girba and the daughter fifteen hundred kilometres away, to Kom Ombo. Everyone watching this scene knew they would never see each other again. After the daughter, who was very big with child, boarded the train, and the train moved off into the desert, the mother looked down at her feet and saw the satchel she had meant to give her, with family things inside, now left behind.
Daub looked at them and then looked out at the hills above Sarra. It was dark now, the sand pale under the stars.
– When I witnessed this, I thought of my father's collection of pictures. It goes on and on, as my father understood, like the detritus of the Second World War that ended in bits and pieces, leaving behind horror and misery in isolated places, these foul refugee camps all over the world, like pools of stagnant water after a flood …