The Walk
First published in English in 2017 by
New Internationalist Publications Ltd
The Old Music Hall
106-108 Cowley Road
Oxford
OX4 1JE, UK
newint.org
© Peter Barry
The right of Peter Barry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
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Edited by Chris Brazier
Front cover design: Rawshock design
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
A catalog for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
(ISBN ebook 978-1-78026-395-3)
For Elizabeth
Contents
Before
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
After
Acknowledgements
About the author
Adrian Burles believed himself to be a good man. He also insisted that the events he organized in the summer of 1987 were done with the best of intentions and were of benefit to millions of people. But that didn’t stop his many critics from condemning his actions as being nothing short of unforgivable – murderous, some even whispered.
He was struck with the idea in the middle of the night after his visit to the health clinic at Korem in the Northern Highlands. It was his first visit to Ethiopia, and the nurse, Anne Chaffey, had said something to him earlier that day that meant little to him at the time – in fact had barely registered in his consciousness. This was most likely because he’d been too upset, as well as embarrassed, by his own sudden, very public and totally uncharacteristic display of emotion.
They’d been standing outside the clinic, and she’d been speaking to him – about what he had little idea, or certainly couldn’t remember later. Perhaps, almost certainly, she’d been firing statistics at him, statistics so outrageous, incessant and ubiquitous that it resulted in a seeming inability on his part to absorb them all. In the few days he’d spent in Ethiopia, such statistics had become almost meaningless, and he’d been asking himself why everyone was so obsessed with them (the latest to find a permanent lodging in his head was that, at the height of the famine two years earlier, 16,000 people had been dying of starvation every week), when their case or whatever it was they were proposing would have been won more speedily by simply telling their audience to look at what was under their noses. Forget the statistics, those cold-blooded facts and numbers, just look at what’s around you! The mathematics are weak in comparison to the spectacle. And it was exactly that – what was directly in front of him – that had distracted him from what the nurse was saying.
At his feet were hundreds of refugees. They were the overflow from the health clinic itself, but also from the camp a couple of miles to the north. They were sitting motionless around Adrian and Anne, packed so closely together that he wasn’t quite sure how the two of them had managed to reach the point where they were then standing. He felt hemmed in on every side, and even though he was outdoors, could scarcely breathe. Knowing there was no place for him to escape to, nowhere that would make him feel any better, made his situation almost unbearable. The only escape would be to get on a plane and leave the country. He was imprisoned in a monochromatic sepia nightmare, with everyone – men and women, young and old, infants – coated in desert dust, the rags on their backs and the pathetic bundles in their arms all covered in a fine film, as if they’d been left untouched for hundreds of years in an Elizabethan attic. They paid absolutely no attention to the two white people in their midst, even to their benefactor, the nurse now addressing Adrian. No one in the crowd spoke. Instead of words there was an incessant hum, a low, hopeless moaning mixed in with a high-pitched, pain-filled keening. Lethargy was too weak a word to describe the inaction of these people; what they exuded was a forceful indifference. They waited at Adrian’s feet with the patience of death.
And it was then that it happened.
As in a nightmare, he suddenly and quite unexpectedly became aware that he was standing directly over a motionless and obviously uninterested mother. She was sitting on the barren earth with a baby at her withered breast, a young child leaning against her on one side, and a dead infant, lying like a discarded rag, on the other. At the very moment Adrian became aware of this horrifying spectacle, one of Anne Chaffey’s assistants suddenly appeared at their side, bent quickly over the infant, and then picked the tiny body up to carry it into the clinic. It was obviously dead. The resemblance to an early-morning refuse collection in a suburban street back home was both startling and unsettling. A dense cloud of flies was covering each of the spectral figures in the scene, and had the effect of momentarily making the infant’s corpse look as if it were moving. Adrian wanted to shout out, to tell the assistant to check the baby’s pulse – just in case – or for Anne Chaffey to intervene, even though he had no idea to what purpose. But he did nothing. He told himself they must surely know what they were doing, that it was not his place… And then, as he watched the assistant disappear inside the clinic with her pitiful burden, he started to weep.
Ethiopia made him feel like this: to feel suffocated and oppressed, to have scarcely the strength to move. He was as ashamed of these feelings as he was startled by the tears that now escaped from beneath his shut eyelids. The nurse stopped talking, and he wondered if it was his tears that had so suddenly and successfully dammed the unending flow of statistics. He opened his eyes to see her quickly turn away and look into the distance, over the heads of the waiting crowd. He supposed it was either to give him time to recover, or because she didn’t know what to say. Finally, she glanced in his direction. It was a shrewd, appraising look, both unselfconscious and uncritical.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t usually…’ He was mortified, and had to make an effort to stifle the urge to tell her that he never cried. He wasn’t one for public displays of emotion, especially in circumstances like these. Here he would have regarded them as a futile, self-serving gesture.
She looked sympathetic, but said nothing. She did, briefly, put a hand on his arm, however, and give it a small squeeze before turning away to scan the people encamped in front of her clinic. ‘I just have to deal with something inside, Mr Burles’, she said a moment later. ‘A crisis – another one.’ She shook her head ruefully.