He felt not just out of place but out of uniform, like a twitchy middle-aged business executive unused to wearing the informal clothes he now found himself in: neatly pressed shorts that went down to the knees, and a baggy T-shirt whose sole purpose – although he would have denied it – was an attempt to hide his bulky frame. Streaks of sunblock were visible on his forearms, legs and the back of his neck, but his face, especially his forehead, beneath the thick crew cut of his salt-and-pepper hair, was already burning red. He was aware, painfully aware, of being a Westerner – pampered, clean, prosperous, heavily perspiring – but most of all, white. Screamingly, obviously white. And screamingly, obviously well fed. Not just cuddly (as he would have described himself), but overweight. He wouldn’t have stuck out more if he’d been stark naked.
Around him were strangers – aliens, skeletons covered in skin. Skin that was translucent and taut, lying over bones like the varnished tissue paper on a child’s model airplane. Heads more like skulls, eyes sunken, hands and feet merely skin and bones. He fought to block the obscenely uncomfortable thought that kept presenting itself to him, the startling similarity to the black-and-white photographs he’d seen of Jewish inmates at Belsen and Auschwitz after liberation. The only difference was that the people around him now were an inky, midnight, coal-like black. Screamingly, obviously black. And screamingly, obviously underfed.
He tried to avoid everyone’s eye. What was the point in trying to engage with anyone? he asked himself. To bridge such gulfs, of colour and nutrition, was an impossibility, and, anyway, he didn’t speak their language. Even a smile in such circumstances would be meaningless. It would most likely be interpreted as an insult, or as a sign of indifference. Fortunately, no one seemed in the slightest bit interested in him; even the children barely glanced in his direction. Everyone was paralysed by torpor. So he stood there – in the dust, out of place, like a cuckoo in a nest of sparrows – and wallowed in a feeling he’d never before experienced: inadequacy.
He was eventually rescued by Anne Chaffey emerging from the clinic. ‘People who visit us are always so moved.’ She was obviously referring to the tears he’d shed a few minutes earlier. These had already dried on his face, leaving his skin feeling uncomfortably taut.
‘Is it possible not to be?’
‘Sometimes, Mr Burles. People’s responses can be surprising. But I always say to visitors, if only those at home could see what you’re seeing. If they could see what’s right in front of us now, and what I see every day, I know they would also be moved. Then they’d be only too happy to help us. Witnessing makes people generous.’
At the time, those words meant little to him, and he’d simply shrugged as if to say, what can you do? ‘We do our best to explain to people… You know… So that they can experience… It’s my job, of course, to…’ His sentences, like rivulets of water on the fringes of a desert, petered out in the heat. He found it almost too great an effort to speak. When he opened his mouth, the hot air made him gasp. He wanted to retreat into the clinic, but knew it was almost as hot in there, possibly hotter.
Later that afternoon, he said goodbye to the old nurse, thanked her for showing him around the health clinic, and flew back to Addis Ababa with the Australian Tim Haden, owner of the private charter business, Abyssinia Air. He felt dissatisfied leaving Korem. Apart from having reached a clearer understanding of the scale of the problem facing charities like Africa Assist, he felt he’d achieved little. It was as if he’d seen a play, been a member of a theatre audience, no more than a spectator – removed, despite having been moved.
‘Learn anything useful?’ the pilot shouted over the roar of the Cessna as the plane climbed over the refugee camp. From above, it resembled a pustular growth on the face of the small town, a mishmash of canvas and cardboard on dead, flattened soil. It was barren, dull and grey, little different from the desert that lay at the foot of the escarpment to the east. A pall of smoke hung above the camp from the countless fires that littered the area, making the sky the same smudgy umber that wraps itself around the industrial towns of the English Midlands. Adrian felt he might be looking down into the ninth circle of Dante’s inferno: all that was missing was the screaming and the wailing. To the south of the camp he could just make out Anne Chaffey’s health clinic.
‘The problem seems intractable, almost too large to comprehend or deal with. I think that’s what I’ve learnt.’
‘Believe it or not, mate, it’s better than it was a couple of years back. Although there are still too many people dying of malnutrition – but then I guess you know that.’
‘Despite Band Aid and Live Aid?’
‘They need a few good harvests rather than money, that’s what many people don’t understand.’
They flew on in silence.
‘If you like, I’ll take you over the desert. It’s scarcely out of the way, and it’s worth seeing.’
A moment later the single-engined Cessna banked towards the east in a broad arc, and it was as if the plane, already airborne, abruptly took off over the edge of the escarpment. The land beneath them simply disappeared. Adrian felt the sudden updraught of air almost throw the small plane back over the clifftop, but then they were descending, the noise of the engine rising in pitch as the plane fell. They finally levelled out, to Adrian’s relief, a couple of hundred feet above the sand.
The emptiness of the environment filled him with foreboding. He felt out of his depth. Such surroundings couldn’t be contained. There were no familiar hedgerows here, no wire fences or dry stone walls to mark off boundaries alongside winding country lanes, nothing to separate one person’s property from another’s, nothing to say this is mine and that is yours – no civilization. This place, which ran wild and unpossessed into the distance, belonged to no one, and Adrian found himself oppressed by the weight of its emptiness. As he stared out, almost mesmerized by its strangeness, he recalled, from school, how Nature hates a vacuum, yet it had left one here. Below them there was nothing, and this nothingness spread as far as the eye could see, to the gentle, barely discernible curve at the very edge of the world. There it doubtless fell away into another void. Certainly there were daubs of coarse grass to be seen here and there, a meagreness of black volcanic rocks, even the rare shrub, but the overall effect was of an immense infinity of sand, like the edge of some huge canvas which the artist has yet to get around to working on. It was as if the subject of the painting were far away in the centre of the canvas, possibly in Europe, while here in a corner of Africa the artist had only found time to apply, in hurried, careless strokes, broad slashes of undercoat. It was the dried-out, burnt-up, barely formed edge of a continent.
Their matchbox plane was being thrown around by the hot air rising off the desert as if in the hands of an incompetent puppeteer. Adrian’s stomach rose and fell in a matching rhythm, but always slightly out of sync, always a split second later. He wondered if he was going to be sick.
‘See them over there?’
He peered through the small, distorted and scratched plastic window at his side, and at first was unable to see what had caught the pilot’s eye, but then he spotted an ectopic human shape, a speck in the enormity of the sun-blackened lava desert below, insect-like in its insignificance. And then his eyes focused on others, groups and individuals, strung out in a meandering, far-flung thread.
‘They’re heading for Weldiya,’ Tim shouted over the noise of the engine. ‘That’s the track they’re on.’ He was twisted round in his seat, and Adrian wished he wouldn’t ignore the controls for such long periods of time. ‘They say there are still 500 refugees arriving there every day.’
More statistics, Adrian thought, more meaningless numbers, but he said nothing. The pilot seemed determined to talk (so much for Australians being laconic, Adrian thought). ‘The country’s always going to have problems while there’s fighting.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’
‘But none of the factions in the civil war will allow