– Your heart line is the Arabian desert, your fate line is the river Nile … Not to scale, of course … Here, he said, circling the mound at the base of her thumb, is the Sahara …
During the months before their departure, first to England and then on to Khartoum, Jean packed away her newly earned diploma, sublet the flat on Clarendon, and moved into the white house with Marina. Neither could conceal their pleasure in this arrangement. They spent long days in Marina's painting room, they walked companionably along the canal through the snow, together they sat bundled with blankets in lawn chairs and stared out at the marsh. Neither could believe their good fortune, their affinities so matched. For Jean, to be so at ease with the older woman, mother and daughter – she was almost drunk with the satiety of it.
The summer before, Jean had brought all the jars from her living room to the house on the marsh and had planted each seedling from her mother's garden on a section of Marina's land. Avery had built a low white fence around it, so Jean would feel that square of earth was hers.
– Here, said Avery in the lamplit twilight, circling the mound at the base of her thumb, is the Sahara … And here, kissing the middle of her palm, is the Great Temple of Abu Simbel …
The Nile breaks over rocks of greatest resistance – creating fissures, foaming gorges, stone islands – these are the impassable cataracts, said Avery, the gateway to Nubia. Beyond this, the river is slow and its banks are cultivated – fields and date forests. The hills here, Avery traced the line down her palm, are gentle – terraces of silt, sandstone, quartzite. Here, between the fate and the heart lines, the Mediterranean collides with Africa – the desert is strewn with the ruins of two cultures. In your hand you hold Christian churches with elaborate frescoes, Coptic temples, fortresses, Stone Age petroglyphs, countless tombs …
For thousands of kilometres east and west, between the Red Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the sand, without allegiance, claims everything. Tiny grains of quartz, oblivious to religion, royalty, or poverty, grind even the hardest stone monuments into dust, and whole dynasties have been abraded to invisibility …
The cataract at Aswan, and the fact that it was carved into the side of a cliff, secured Abu Simbel for centuries. The Sahara slowly climbed the cliff until only the very tip of the temple was visible …
The night unfolded, Avery explaining all he knew. Jean heard in his voice how hungrily he desired this chance, not to be the one building the dam but the one to salvage. At last, he looked to her for her answer.
– I don't have anything with me, said Jean, but I can wear your clothes …
They arrived in London in January. Avery's cousin Owen was away and they stayed in his flat, a fashionable idyll of darkly painted rooms, chandeliers and silk carpets; teak furniture, firesides heaped with cushions. Only the kitchen had never been renovated, and in the cupboards Avery recognized Aunt Bett's dishes – chipped and faded – from their childhood. It was a nostalgia Avery had not expected of Owen, and he was grateful for the discovery, as if the smallest details of their years together during the war had not been forgotten.
Dusk in Owen's bedroom, the window open to the rain, roofs black and shining, a crack of sunset. In this rainy blackness and this unexpected last light, the scattering of birds just before dark, both felt a new kind of desire, inseparable from the city. Inseparable from London, January 1964. The desire experienced in unfamiliar streets, one's body never more known by another.
During their last days in England, after staying with Aunt Bett in Leighton Buzzard, Avery and Jean drove through the valley of the River Usk. They stopped at a pub that hung over the rail line in the thick forest above the tracks. On the door was posted a warning: We strongly recommend that you do not bring your children here after 9 p.m. Jean was uneasy – what violence arose here and spilled into the forest at night? – but they had not passed another place to stop for many miles, and so they went in. Avery ordered a glass of beer and Jean, after noticing the barmaid herself was drinking a cup behind the bar, ordered a pot of tea. Still she felt uneasy. The dark forest was all around them; they heard a train passing through the valley. Then, on the wall above the bar Jean noticed a similar sign: We strongly advise you do not bring your children here after 9 p.m., in consideration of the patrons who wish to enjoy the peace and quiet of this establishment. The barmaid was watching her and gave her a wink. “Aye,” she said, “people will bring their crying bairns in the evenings and no one can heft a pint in peace.”
They sat quietly as the sound of the train faded into the forest.
– My father and I took the train from Rome to Turin, said Avery. We sat in a compartment with a young couple. The way they sat next to each other told their whole story, his hand on her thigh while he pretended to read the newspaper, her head on his shoulder while she pretended to sleep. The restless desire in them was so palpable it infected my father and me with an embarrassment that I was too young to understand and we kept getting up to pace in the swaying corridors.
At last we arrived at the huge train station in Turin. Since we each had only a small valise between us, we decided to walk the short distance to the hotel where my father was to have a business meeting. As we walked through the immense station, my eyes were suddenly caught by a small sign, which, if I had only been walking faster, I might have missed. There was a single sentence painted on a wooden board that stated that this station was where the deportations had taken place during the war and gave the number – in the hundreds of thousands – of those who had been sent to their deaths from the very place we stood. It was a small notice, barely visible, and to this day I cannot say why my eyes did not overlook it. When we walked out into the sunny street, within a few feet of the station doors, I tripped on the pavement and fell. I cut my head and I needed stitches. My father had to take me to the hospital and missed his meeting and that is the story of the scar on my chin. I wanted nothing more than to leave that place, said Avery. It seemed to me a city of utter dread.
Jean was quiet. He thought of her quietness, this now familiar quietness of hers, as her heart thinking.
– The countless places in cities that have known violent death, said Jean, not just places where terrible things have happened in wartime, but all the other misery that is always left uncommemorated – a car accident, some violence inflicted – how can we mark these places? One could probably not walk a block without stepping into a place of mourning; we could not mark them all.
Sadness descended. Avery took Jean's hand.
– Let's go, he said.
Outside, the wind moved through the high leaves. The small scar on Avery's chin disappeared in the bright afternoon sunlight.
– Before we left Turin, said Avery, my father, in the hope of cheering me up, took me to the famous old café, Baratti & Milano, with its glass cases displaying chocolates and nougats, the carved wooden tables and chairs and starched white tablecloths and heavy silverware. The trolleys of opera cakes and mousses, the petit fours, the phyllo pastry and lemon custards, the high cakes with designs trickled along the top. My father wanted to distract me, but the dark elegance of the place depressed me. I looked around at the waiters in their black-and-white suits carrying their silver salvers, and it seemed to me that the room must not have changed in fifty years. I could not stop myself from wondering how many children had drunk their last cups of cocoa in this place, perhaps in the very chair I was sitting in. I kept thinking, Would the city have felt ominous to me even if I had not seen that marker in the station? Would I have felt this foreboding nonetheless, this presence, this dread, this hauntedness we sometimes feel – inexplicable, ineffable – in certain places, in a cast of light? In any case, my father drank his tea, and I ate my chocolate ice cream from its ornate sweating silver dish. We left the hotel early the next morning, after a restless night – my father because he had missed his business meeting and I because of my apprehension – and we walked to the train station. My father – no doubt remembering London during the B
litz or other places I knew nothing about – said, ‘Some places are drenched with sorrow.’ I remember specifically he used the word ‘drenched’ and we walked for a while in silence, my hand in his. Then I thought, Some people are like that, drenched in sorrow, despite the expression on their face.
When Hassan Dafalla, the commissioner in charge of the emigration, read the results of the census on a May morning in 1961, he learned that all Nubian land – without exception – was registered in the name of someone who'd died centuries before. This statistic moved him deeply and, with the report still in his hand, he walked out of his office in Wadi Halfa to contemplate it.
Hassan Dafalla was a man given to reflection, and the Sudanese government could not have chosen anyone better suited to the task of resettling an entire nation. He was a man of feeling – of empathy, fairness, and an extraordinary patience for the meaningful detail. It was Hassan Dafalla who ensured that an extra ration of grain reached the bakeries before the journey, and who arranged that there be a birthing car with hospital beds on the train for expectant mothers. It was Hassan Dafalla who handed a parcel of shrouds to the train conductor, in the event they might be needed during the long emigration, more than twelve hundred kilometres from the villages of Nubia to the new settlement at Khashm el Girba, near the sluggish Atbara River. The Atbara was a seasonal river, which annually turned to dust. It was Hassan Dafalla who insisted that the names of the villages be posted in the new town instead of numbers, though his order was ignored. And it was Hassan Dafalla who stood silenced at the sight of the new houses, hollow blocks of concrete that sat in rows on the ground with no connection to it, like packing cases. It was he who felt the acute, breath-taking, shock of defeat; and saw that life can be skinned of meaning, skinned of memory.
The houses in the “New Halfa” scheme had sloping tin or asbestos roofs and rooms too small for the families assigned to live in them; thus, villages were split apart. And when Hassan Dafalla saw that there was not a single tree in Khashm el Girba, he returned with a gift of thirty thousand tree shoots. Eight hundred date shoots were planted along the main street in a tree celebration. It was a shamefully deficient gift, he thought, for the ones who mourned their groves by the Nile.
When it was certain the Aswan High Dam would be built, the census-takers from the Department of Statistics in Sudan were sent from village to village. They recorded the number of inhabitants in each dwelling, the number of livestock, an accurate account of the burden of furniture for each family. Everything would have to be carried – by lorry, boat, and train – and the number of railcars and trains accurately calculated.
Hassan Dafalla had studied the numbers carefully. In the Sudanese area under his concern there were: 27 villages, 70,000 souls; 7,676 houses, with an average number of rooms calculated at 5.8; the number of residents per room 0.9 in the town of Wadi Halfa and 1.1 in the villages. Of the animals to be transported there were: 34,146 goats, 19,315 sheep, 2,831 head of cattle, 608 camels, 415 donkeys, 86 horses, 35,000 chickens, 28,000 pigeons, and, grouped together, 1,564 ducks and geese.
Each fruit tree would have to be counted and described, so that proper compensation could be determined. The date trees fell into the following categories: fruit-bearing female trees including young females of five years, non-bearing trees (males and older trees), independent shoots (three to four years old), small shoots (one to three years old), and the vulnerable baby shoots still attached to the mothers' roots.
Of all the villages included in the mass relocation, only the inhabitants of one village – Degheim – refused to cooperate, though, of course, the water would defeat them in the end. The women of Degheim, in their black gargaras, swarmed and shouted, “Fadiru wala hagumunno Khashm el Girba la” – We will die rather than go to Khashm el Girba – and created a great cloud of dust, throwing into the air the earth that was no longer theirs.
The first village to be evacuated from the Wadi Halfa district was Faras. The journey would take a biblical forty hours, an exodus of epic proportion.
Hassan Dafalla had requisitioned 20,000 jute sacks, 20,000 coils of rope, and 15,000 baskets for the journey. Twenty lorries had been pressed into service to transport the baggage to the train station. More than a hundred porters were required to load lorries and then the fifty-five train cars, the sixty-six goods cars, and the two hundred and sixteen animal wagons and the wagons of fodder and water for the livestock; and before all this, the villagers on the west bank would have to cross the river by steamer. The inhabitants of the Kokki islands – deep in the narrow gorges of the Second Cataract where no boat large enough to carry their baggage could reach them – made rafts of logs and inflated water skins and floated their worldly goods to shore.
January 6, 1964. On the east bank of the Nile at Faras, the train was waiting, complete with hospital carriage for the ill and elderly and for the women who might give birth at any moment. On the west bank, porters began to carry the bags, mattresses, and baskets of every size that were heaped at the front gate of every home, down through the village to where the steamer was docked.
Hassan Dafalla watched as the Nubians took the great wooden keys from their locks and then disappeared back into their homes to look once more. He watched as they sat silently in the cemetery. On the steamer, every eye took in the sight of their departing village; surely, thought Hassan Dafalla, few places on this earth have been looked at by so many at once, with such common feeling. Yet he knew history was crammed with precisely such scenes. Crowding the train station were the villagers from Faras East who had come to wish their neighbours safe passage and who would very soon be making the same journey themselves. He watched as all boarded the train, straining to look back, and as the train driver fastened branches from the Faras date groves to the front of the locomotive, shouting, “Afialogo, heir ogo” – good health, prosperity. He watched as the train slowly started to move, until it disappeared into the desert.
They would follow the main Khartoum line to Atbara junction, then by the Port Sudan line to Haya junction, then south to Kassala and Khashm el Girba. At each village along the rail line, people crowded the station, waving and calling out their support and, wherever the train stopped, dispensing tea and gifts of food to the passengers: sacks of sugar, flour, wheat and rice, butter, oil, cheese and honey. “Afialogo, heir ogo, adeela, adeela.” At Aroma, all the tribesmen of the Hadandawa gathered on their camels; each with a sword, a lick of light, at their sides. Pointing their staffs to the sky they banged their copper drums to the word “Dabaywa” – welcome. And so it was the same, at Sarra East, Dibeira, Ashkeit, Dabarosa, Tawfikia, Arkawit, and El Jebel. At Angash station, at Haya, and Kassala, the farmers loaded the train with generous sacks of citrus and vegetables until there was not a centimetre of space left in the bulging cars. Night was falling. Suddenly, at the Butana Bridge, every passenger leaned toward the windows for a glimpse of the Atbara River. Those who had stopped weeping began again, at the sight of a river so sickly, so dirty and small compared to the Nile they had left behind. At the other end of the bridge in the distance they had their first glimpse of the row of white houses waiting for them: Village #33.
In mourning, the Nubian women removed their black gargaras, flowing as the Nile, and disembarked wearing the plain saris of central Sudan.
A few days after the evacuation, Hassan Dafalla returned to Faras to meditate upon all he had seen. The sun beat down into silence. He saw the holes where the decorative plates had been pulled from the walls. He saw the footprints of hyenas everywhere.
After several days sunk in thought, Hassan Dafalla journeyed to visit the exiled settlers at Khashm el Girba. “We had a mutual longing to see each other,” he wrote later in his diary, “as if we had been parted for a very long time.”
At 9 a.m. on the day of the evacuation of Sarra, Commissioner Hassan Dafalla had arrived, hours before the train was scheduled to depart, to find the village already deserted. He stood in shock, at the wild unreality of finding no one th
ere to emigrate. The night before, all the baggage had been loaded onto the train; wagons and heavy trucks stood in the sand, braying with livestock. Yet in the morning there was not a single villager to be found. Commissioner Dafalla, at a loss for what to do, climbed the hill above the village to think. When he reached the top he was startled again, this time to find himself looking down upon a shining green pool where yesterday there had been only stones and sand. Now he saw that hundreds of palm branches, shimmering in the heat, had been heaped upon the graves of the cemetery. In a great circle around the graveyard the villagers were dancing the zikir. For two hours longer, Commissioner Dafalla sat on the hill while the villagers of Sarra read and sang to their dead. Suddenly, the green pool bled apart and reformed as a river, as all of Sarra moved in a wailing line up the hill, carrying their palm branches from the graves to the train.
The very staples that the Nubians had so expertly cultivated would now have to be bought at market – lentils, beans, chickpeas, lupins, and peas. In the new settlement there were no terraces for the women to sit together, no Nile with its green inlets and islands where they could sail their feluccas and watch the steamers passing to and from Egypt, loaded with goods. Now there was only the steep gorge of the Atbara River, with its barren banks, the dry thorny acacia scrub, and the rainy savannah. There were no palm date forests and no limitless hills of the Sahara. The women permanently gave up the elegant gargara because now it simply trailed through mud.
Their sense of time changed; the way they looked at sky and stars was now different. Their Coptic calendar was replaced by the Arab stellar calendar. They learned to predict rainfall, the fierce tropical rains, from the direction of lightning – lightning in the east brings the storm, but lightning in other directions turns it away.