Free Bettany's Book by Thomas Keneally Page B

those drilling trucks go past a little previous,’ said the nurse. ‘You know the women have been walking twelve miles for waterover to Well 17 since the main well here gave up the ghost.’
    Now women and children emerged from the laneways at the camp, ululating and crowding up to the clinc to greet Abuk. The midwife went to the door and the crowd drew her away, staring at her clothes, covering their mouths with long fingers.
    ‘All right if you and Stoner sleep in the clinic here?’ asked Therese.
    ‘We’re not an item,’ protested Prim.
    Therese said she didn’t think they were. She invited Prim to ‘settle in like a good child’ while she went to make tea.
    ‘Wait,’ said Prim. ‘We met something out there.’
    ‘Oh yes?’
    And Prim for the first time related the story of the journey, knowing by hearing herself tell the tale that she had somehow let a mist grow around the day’s more massive events. ‘Stoner can give you more details,’ she promised Therese.
    ‘Dear God,’ said Therese. ‘I’d heard things were bad out there.’
    But she too seemed to be speaking of remote happenings, as if Adi Hamit was all the catastrophe she could afford to give her intimate attention. She asked a few questions – were the people in hundreds or thousands? – and then seemed gratefully to return to more immediate matters. ‘That Abuk! Isn’t she a darling? Awful history of course. But then everybody here has one. Did she tell you she was taken by the army? What happened is beyond imagining.’ Therese gestured towards some vague conception of possible abuse which lay like an amputated but neutralised reality in the darkest corner of the clinic. ‘Abuk was an abid . In the strictest meaning of the term. She was a slave, that little creature.’
    ‘Surely not,’ said Prim. The concept – Abuk a slave – struck her at once with an obscure but intense force. Its redolence was so strong. It was as if something live had not only nudged her mind but physically quickened within her, jolting her, making her stumble in search of equilibrium. She felt herself trembling, as she had on seeing the town-bound clans. But where they had numbed her, this enthralled her, producing in her a form of particular rage she had not felt this morning.
    ‘It’s a fact,’ said the nurse. ‘She was property of an officer. And let me say: With all that entails! See, her village was raided. She saw one of her children thrown on to the fire by soldiers, and another one hacked to death with a banja by militiamen. Death’s very graphic down there in the South, by all accounts. The militia still ride round on horses, with big swords. And Kalashnikovs of course. They sold her to the officer,and when he was finished with her, he on-sold her to a farmer south of here. It isn’t uncommon, you know.’
    The tale of children hacked and ablaze hung in the air with its normal fearsome weight. Such stories were regularly heard, were the commonplace of discourse.
    ‘But she’s here now. How did she get away?’ Prim heard her voice quaver.
    ‘There’s an Austrian woman – you know the one – what’s-her-name? God almighty, I can’t remember. Is it Trotsky? Something like that. Stoner probably knows her. Comes into the country with lots of money and just buys people back. In batches, sometimes. She’s the only one who does it. They say she’s a little nutty. The group she works for brings out this yearly report on her activities. But no one believes them because they’re kind of Alleluia Jesus Protestant evangelicals. Anyhow, that was the woman bought her from the farmer, and then Abuk came here, where her mother and surviving child had turned up, and then she’s selected to be a midwife. Great little woman. We should congratulate ourselves.’
    Prim had heard at parties in Khartoum whispers of slavery and tales of anti-slavery antics by an Austrian woman. Veteran NGO people shook their heads and laughed over her occasional excursions