Free Deep Field by Tom Bamforth Page B

this experimental novel, which had initially made it almost unreadable, actually began to take on new meaning. In the destruction of the earthquake the rationally organised state was nowhere to be seen, while moments of continuity and recovery carried the absurdity of fleeting encounters whose own salient features remained etched in my mind, such as the orange sellers setting up brightly coloured stalls in the ruined city of Balakot. Such images would continue throughout my career, like the bottles of Coke kept cool in holes in the ground in Darfur.
    A week’s mandatory rest and recreation, coincidentally in Germany, compounded the sense of alienation in catastrophe. Despite the elegance and solidity of the country’s reconstructed cities, every corner of every square seemed to have been annotated with the memorials of crimes past. At one stage, finding a corner of Berlin near the Humboldt University in the (appropriately renamed) Bebelplatz, I stood in the sun and looked for a moment at the attractive view of neoclassical buildings dominating the square. This was an illusory moment of tranquillity, as I soon realised I was standing over a glass paving stone under which stood an empty white bookshelf—the very place where the Nazi regime had burned ‘un-German’ books more than seventy years earlier. Unable to escape from either the reality or the collective memory of death and destruction, I got on the next train and fled to Belgium—an artificial buffer state between the European powers and itself the product of European conflict: a cartographic attempt to discourage wars between France and Germany. A short stroll the next day down the imposing grandeur of the Avenue des Colonies, built from the profits of King Leopold’s peculiarly brutal nineteenth-century occupation of the Congo, immediately put paid to my hope of finding somewhere not contaminated by violence. Thinking, for some reason, that I might find this escape on a tour of the Royal Palace, I soon found myself in the Hall of Mirrors gazing at another massacre: an enormous insect-like chandelier and ceiling decoration constructed from the phosphorescent wings plucked from 1.6 million Buprestidae beetles. These were quite common and not an endangered species, according to the information plaque in the hall, but this claim seemed unlikely given the aestheticised scale of this entomological carnage.
    I couldn’t wait to get back to Pakistan and was not sure what was more disquieting—the monuments to savagery in a European ‘dark continent’ or the contemporary state of crisis in which I lived. At the very least, while Europe seemed in constant mourning over its appalling wars, in Pakistan, at the time, there was a humanitarian moment caused by the shock of the earthquake—a random calamity rather than the deliberate and genocidal expansionist ambitions of states. Everyone was taken totally by surprise, and there was a brief sense of common purpose to do something urgently, even as calculations of political interest and influence to be gained from the disaster began to brew.
    I was redeployed to Muzaffarabad, the destroyed capital of Kashmir and the epicentre of the earthquake, which still hosted the majority of the people living in residual camps. A group of British MPs from the cross-party House of Commons International Development Committee was coming through, and this was seen as an important opportunity to make a strong case for increased aid for the ‘second winter’ and to add external pressure on the government to allow preparatory relief operations. I was responsible for looking after the MPs and presenting our case.
    It was a strange, heartening and baffling experience. I met with the committee’s clerk before meeting the MPs themselves and was impressed. She had a PhD in development and had read every report and studied UN maps and was exceptionally well-informed. She took no persuading that we faced a humanitarian crisis, albeit on a smaller