Prim, as thoroughly absorbed in the tasks of storage, distribution and record-keeping as she had ever hoped to be, was still possessed at most conscious moments by the thought of Sherif, or by the redolence of his character.
When the Canadian NGO took over Abu Grada, and Prim was back in Khartoum, feeling enlarged by the zealousness of what she had been engaged in, and suspicious of how that might cause her to act towards Sherif. Soon he visited with a draft proposal and questionnaire to send to Canberra. He also said that his Friday afternoons were free, and when he asked had she seen the souk in Omdurman, she found herself saying, ‘Just a flying visit.’
Thus she travelled as if for the first time in the aromatic avenues of spice dealers, amongst women who displayed coffee beans, ground nuts and fruit on woven panniers, past the stalls of the makers of filigreed jewellery and the sellers of amulets. Sherif said the small size of the produce market showed how scant Sudanese product was, and showed how poorly infrastructure – roads, railways – operated. But Prim shook her head. She did not want, amongst the fortune-teller stalls, to be distracted by politics.
The hornet’s nest dome of the tomb of the Mahdi hung over their Omdurman excursion. The Mahdi’s supporters had overrun the Anglo-Egyptian forces in the Sudan, and he had not lived to see General Kitchener take the country back for the British in 1898. Yet his ghost was so potent that Kitchener had destroyed the mausoleum. Rebuilt in modern times, entry to it was forbidden to infidels, but the house of the Khalifa, the Mahdi’s successor, was available to all-comers. Prim realised she had scarcely looked at it when Helene Codderby had brought her touring. She was suddenly engrossed by relics of the Mahdi’s war and Kitchener’s invasion, on which Sherif was calmly discursive. After God gave him his victories, said Sherif, the Mahdi lived and died in ‘heroic depravity’.
Prim wished to believe that her lack of interest the time Helene took her there to see mementos of past Sudanese travail, and the patchwork uniforms of the Mahdi’s devout soldiers, had been due to her having been in the country such a short time, of having no sense of its diversity. Besides, Sherif knew so much more even than Helene – he knew in religious terms what the diamond-shaped patches of cloth on each uniform stood for. She could see him as a calm, convinced warrior, driving out the occupying unbeliever.
Prim had a long-standing arrangement with Helene to visit the whirling dervishes in Omdurman, who danced to achieve union with God. She had found regular reasons for putting it off. When, a few days later, Sherif suggested it, she agreed to go with him. He drove her across the White Nile bridge, left the car by the soccer stadium, and walked through a suburb of shanties before arriving in a square in front of a mosque named after a famous mystic, Hamad el Niil. This was late May, when temperatures were at an apogee, yet Prim had a sense, moving in long-sleeved blouse and knee-length skirt, of pushing aerobically through the heated air, her thin hands brown as an Egyptian’s.
By the gate of the mosque a flautist was surrounded by drummers, and in front of them was the sheik of the mosque wearing black and kneeling on a carpet of red. Red, Sherif told her, was the colour of unity with God. The flute was joined by drums, by whose thudding the dervishes appeared in fez-like hats and black cloaks from the direction of the nearby graveyard. They approached the sheik, kissed his hand and began to whirl, while the orchestra played and sang of the divine union which the dancers strove to achieve through giddiness.
The dancers shed their black overgarments and danced in patchwork tunics, just like the garments of the soldiers of the Mahdi. The name ‘whirling dervish’ had been applied to all the Mahdi’s troops but, said Sherif, it was only a minority of Sudanese who pursued Sufism, the mystic side of Islam. The Mahdi himself had danced towards God in a giddiness of eroticism.
Why did Sherif insist on taking her to such places? Why share a meeting in a palm-shaded tea-house at the city’s dusty Botanic Gardens, during which he talked drowsily, in a tannin-sated voice, about the spread of desert since his grandparents’ days, about his father who had been elderly when he was born, and a mother who died young of meningitis. As he spoke, the contours of his sentences felt so familiar to her that she forgot for minutes at a time that she was not Sudanese.
Since the successful graduation of Abuk Alier, Austfam was supporting two more women at the School of Midwifery attached to the women’s hospital in Omdurman. Partly from duty, partly out of interest, Prim visited them, and they walked her through the wards. In one room she saw an exquisite young Sudanese woman, dark-skinned but with well-defined Arab features, lying on a bed, dressed in long white skirt and embroidered shirt. Her eyes were skilfully accentuated with kohl, and the tips of her fingers were darkened with henna, as were the ankles and soles of her feet. Prim and the midwives-in-training possessed enough Arabic between them to speak with her, and during the conversation her eyes kept straying to the door. She was waiting for her husband. She was to go home that day with her new child, who was sleeping, and for its father’s arrival she was beautified. A severe-looking nurse, dressed in layers of white, joined the group, and proved jovial. They all shared the young mother’s exaltation at having given birth to a healthy Sudanese boy, and now she was prettified and – neither the nurse nor the wife were embarrassed to say it – sewn up again. The labia had been sutured together – infibulated was the medical term – allowing only enough space for sex. Thus the vagina was restored to a tightness considered beneficial to any marriage. The midwives unabashedly discussed the practice – all the women of the region seemed to talk freely about it, but only in all-female company. Infibulation provided the eternally, the artificially unstretched vagina, demanded by men – even of the educated urban middle class to which this woman’s husband belonged – and promoted by mothers who had been through it all themselves. The severe-looking nurse turned to Prim and said in English, ‘It pleases her husband, who gives her gifts.’
Thus Sherif could not be interested in her, Prim believed; even if she tried she could not make herself lovely with kohl and henna. She was the sort of obsessed Western woman who had lost the gift for loveliness, though beauty might still perversely cling for a time. And she could certainly not countenance infibulation: her culture disposed her to see it as a regional lunacy, just as the lack of infibulation made the West seem lunatical to many Africans. Yet her imagination was fired by the joy and wifely alacrity of the young woman waiting, a restored bride, for the bridegroom. Well, it was just another case of women being suckers, and she had been an adequate sucker. But she could never provide such a display, such a waiting, such a sacrifice of flesh, even for Sherif.
Unhenna-ed and uncut, Prim had good reason to be armed against the fatal soppiness of womanhood. Yet in a recurrent daydream which arose without any conscious welcome from her, she saw herself grafted to Sherif. This was not in any frankly erotic way – she could avoid thinking about his chest, the mystery of his penis, the more frankly legible contour of his arse. She imagined herself instead as a little bio-packet of material, lodged under his skin, a kind of slow-release, beneficial substance which became assumed into him, growing, breathing, declining and willingly dying with him. This, she was aware, was desire attempting a conceit, imagination trying to lead her to the bed but dancing behind an image more medical than sexual. She felt obligated to see through all these tricks.
Secure in seeing through herself, in her contempt for fantasy, she invited him to the office to arrange dates for the proposed Adi Hamit survey. It could not occur before September, she would need to tell him. She would be involved in Darfur, or in the office, working with the relief effort, until then.
He came to the office and brought his normal surreptitious bottle of booze, this time vodka. The dates for the Adi Hamit survey finalised, they moved upstairs for a drink. ‘I am pleased to have such a pleasant boss,’ he told her. When he got up to go, she reached from her seat and took his wrist. ‘Stay a bit longer,’ she said. Outraged with herself, she could hear her own pulse.
r /> She realised then that she would need to lead him to her bed simply because it provided the only arena for the energies now running in the room. On the way in he said nothing: no noble exhortations to think again, no confession he had been waiting to be led in by her for a week or a month. Earnestly she unbuttoned his shirt and saw that dense, African body below. It had a young man’s lustrous hair on it. So he was still young beneath the middle-aged demeanour.
He took over, undressing her with a set of scarcely audible sighs, and was so swollen, she observed, that he had scant time to say the expected and demanded things. But he said she was very beautiful. ‘I haven’t got any kohl or henna,’ she told him. ‘No delkah.’
‘What’s all this chatter,’ he asked her. After cupping and praising her breasts, by entering he drove from her body all the skilled arguments about versions of womanhood, ornamentation and device. She grabbed his hips. She held him roughly. She demanded he reach a certain limit only she knew well. He must be dragged, and incited to do superbly. She saw her knees lock him to the task. Imagine, she thought. Imagine.
In Prim’s first five years in the Sudan, Dimp had pleaded with her frequently to repent of her wilful choice of life in Khartoum and take a post somewhere more accessible. At the very least, she said, Prim should come home for a visit. Dimp made plans to visit Khartoum herself in 1986, not least to inspect the lover to whom Prim made occasional and typically guarded references in her letters. But then Bren’s annulment came through, and her marriage was planned.
Dimp had an unquestioning sense that she should be married to Bren. She was the sort of woman to whom the initial risks a man took were of great and binding significance. His first ardent approach to her at the film-tax seminar was a gesture of appropriate and compelling scale. She had not doubted since that hour that she was bound to him by it.
On top of that, the trouble he had taken seeking an annulment, to cancel at its root one marriage so that she was his first wife, was a rite of extreme ardour to her. In her view of the world, it was an unnecessary process, but she was impressed by how much it meant to him, of how it added weight to his purpose.
At the time of the wedding, Prim sent her warmest wishes but pleaded that an emergency in the Southern, tropical part of the country, where Austfam maintained a feeding station, made it impossible for her to come back. It was apparent Prim was engaged in pressing humanitarian efforts, but pleased to be.
Prim took some leave the following year but found reason not to fly further than London. She was still grotesquely scared of coming home. Bren did not want his wife to go and fetch her, either. It might be counter-productive, he suggested with his lumbering canniness. Well, maybe they could call in briefly, detouring from the Gulf, on a trip to Europe.
For whatever reason – though Dimp had no doubt of her love for her sister, or her sister’s for her – no visit, either way, occurred.
Some time after her marriage to D’Arcy, in a Southern Hemisphere summer, when she and her husband were happily established on the edge of the massive harbour in their house named Woolarang at Double Bay, Dimp faxed her sister. She had just heard on Radio National that the elected government of the Sudan which had come into being a little time after Nimeiri’s fall, had been deposed by a group of army officers. So, Dimp understood, Prim had by 1989 lived under three Sudanese governments – the supposedly Marxist government of President Nimeiri, the civilian government just toppled, and now a military council. This seemed another reason for her to come home. Military rule surely would make Prim’s spartan life even less comfortable.
The second subject of the fax was a Sydney barrister named Frank Benedetto. Dimp was sure Prim had met him at a party, before she left Australia. ‘He acted for Bren’s company once. A pleasant, bear-like sort of fellow, you know. Recently made a Queen’s Counsel – I wonder what his Italian mum and dad think of that! Well, he got a Master’s degree in pastoral history before he did law! That is, a degree in sheep!’
This man Benedetto told Dimp that he liked to visit all the old houses of the squattocracy in New South Wales and Victoria, and whenever there was an auction involving one of those old places, he would turn up to bid. ‘Second-generation Australian,’ wrote Dimp to her sister, ‘but he’s more interested in that stuff than the rest of us!’ Recently he had attended the sell-up of a sheep station named Eudowrie in the Riverina, the estate of a deceased, remote Bettany cousin, an old man – someone they had not met, unless perhaps, when they were infants, their father had taken them to visit the place. Dimp had a hazy memory of visiting some broad, wide-open pastures, of herself and Prim chasing lambs, and an old man telling them to stop because it wasn’t good for the lambs’ hearts.
Benedetto’s reason for turning up at this sheep station auction was that he believed a nineteenth-century manuscript entitled Sheep Breeding and the Pastoral Life in New South Wales, a work published in 1882 by a Bettany ancestor, Jonathan Bettany, was likely to be part of the estate. ‘You remember the book,’ Dimp told her sister. ‘Father sometimes showed it to guests. It had that bloody big fold-out map of pastoral leases in the back which made about as much sense as an anatomical drawing. It had riveting chapter headings like “How to Choose a Balanced Flock”, or “The Tobacco Water Cure for Scab in Sheep”, or “Thoughts anent the New Land Bill now before Parliament”. He wrote of a diphtheria epidemic which hit the Monaro, but even made that boring. But he’s a hero to this Benedetto.’
At the auction, Frank Benedetto bought the station papers, the stock books and so on, and the prize, the manuscript of Sheep Breeding, for a mere $8000, and passed them on to the Mitchell Library for nothing – an act of largesse such as particularly the son of Calabrian immigrant peasants might relish. But Dimp reported to Prim:
There were some other and more private documents of our esteemed ancestor nearly-Sir-Jonathan, Member of the Legislative Assembly for New South Wales – ‘Missed a knighthood by a whisker,’ as Dad used to say – which came with the papers. Benedetto knew from Bren and from Enzo Kangaroo that I was a fully paid-up Bettany, and he thought I should have what he called these ‘more private’ papers. He sent the stuff by courier. So I have the documents, and can tell from a quick read that Benedetto has behaved with great delicacy.
The main item Benedetto’s given me is a sort of confessional journal from Jonathan Bettany – it’s headed Bettany’s Book and reads almost as if it were written with publication in mind, a far more literary publication than Sheep Breeding. This may be a rare intimately personal account of Australian pastoral life, and that makes it all the more interesting that Benedetto gave it up out of some sort of sensibility! If it’s to be published … well, he thinks that ought to be up to me. Then there’s a series of letters written in her convict condition by his wife, our ancestor, of the revealing kind all of us maybe write in hours of stress but which we might hope to get rid of before we die. I intend to exercise some rare discipline and leave them until I’ve transcribed a large slab of the memoir, which I’ll send to you in bits.
But – and this is fascinating – these papers show that Mrs Bettany, our ancestor Sarah, was not only a convict, but Jewish as well. Don’t you wish our poor parents were around for that piece of news? To hear that! The wife of nearly-Sir Jonathan Bettany, great man of sheep! Isn’t it stimulating? I wonder if that modicum of Hebraic blood explains my filmic tendencies, and your career as a pilgrim.
Amongst the documents, said Dimp, was a picture of nearly-Sir Jonathan and nearly-Lady Bettany, as they were in the flesh and as they might have been aggrandised if his pastoral Free Trade party had remained in government in Macquarie Street a little longer.
He is sitting, she is standing, according to what you’d loosely call the habit of the time. He is older, a little paunchier than the ideal pioneer should be, but not too much so. A very handsome, square-faced, clear-eyed fellow with eyes a bit startled by life or the photographer’s flash. Wearing a very well-cut suit, but the way a man who is muscular does, a
s if he’s just waiting to throw it off, put on dungarees and jump into the saddle again. He certainly loved bloody sheep!
But Dimp was not content to mention the photograph, and promise to send it on to Khartoum. It had clearly precipitated in her, a woman nearly without clan, a tide of clannish analysis.
As for her, Sarah, the wife, she is luscious. A-1. Splendid. Dominant. A long head, piercing dark eyes full of intelligence. A superb figure despite the five kids she bore him. So, muted along the way by a few Scots brunettes, she’s clearly the wellspring of our problems, Prim, of – I might as well bloody say it, since every other bastard does – our beauty. Came to us through father, those fine lines he had in his sixties and even in his casket, even in death. Those darker features were not quite Anglo-Scots, were they? They were what attracted and scared the hell out of Mum. What’s in this picture, a kind of alien lushness from Poland or Russia – or even from somewhere like Persia, something Sephardic Jewish – that’s what attracted her to Dad, but then she was panicked by it in us. Poor old thing, she tried to tamp it down for our own good with our pretty, crocheted, bloody silly names – Dimple for me, Primrose for you.
For the time being Dimp promised to attach a good photocopy of the photograph.
So I am sending you in batches what I have transcribed of the old boy’s journal, and the old girl’s letters, in a belief that it’s important to know what the founding virtues of your ancestors were. But, more important, to know what were the founding crimes.
Such a statement, Prim thought when she read it in Khartoum, was pure Dimp. She inspected the photocopy of the photograph. The splendid upright woman did have a face a bit like Dimp’s. But there was in Bettany’s eye, she was sure, some of her own discontent. More than she would ever tell her sister, Prim fancied she saw in him a desire like her own: to find new landscapes in which to remake himself.