Michela Wrong - Borderlines

The doctor’s name, I remember, was Boronski. A Pole? I could remember the photos paper-clipped to the drawing, showing the welts and scars. The ugly Polaroids flashed across my mind’s eye, like lurid prompt cards. If the other side used that technique, you could be sure our boys did, too. And how about rape? Maybe I could handle it once, but repeatedly? Day in, day out? What would that be like? I remembered a newspaper article about a hospital in eastern Congo that treated male soldiers raped so often they’d had to use sanitary pads. But, hang on, this wasn’t Congo. What had Winston once said, explaining why it was important never to shout in the office? ‘This is a society where nothing is seen as more shaming than a loss of self-control.’ But now we were back to Winston again, and how he would react, my parents and their feelings, that tidal wave of mortification.

I briefly tried the line of argument that had powered me so effectively through the last few years. The one that ran: ‘Without Jake, there is nothing left to lose. There is nothing at stake.’ But despair no longer consoled. My anxiety scurried like a gerbil on a wheel. The passports had long ago shifted from pleasantly cool to clammily sticky against my skin. I tried some deep breathing, but my heart wouldn’t stop pounding, and my mouth was so dry that my lips kept sticking to my gums. At intervals, I lowered the coat off my face to ask Green Eyes for water, and once in a while, he ordered a colleague to fetch me a plastic beaker.

At a certain point, though, the adrenalin runs out. And then you find the peace of acceptance, the passivity of the internee. By the time I noticed that dawn was about to break, golden shards of light piercing the long grasses at the far end of the runway, I felt Valium-calm and as ancient as the landscape. There was nothing they could do to me now that would frighten or surprise me. I had done their work for them. I had dismantled myself.

There came a changing of the guard. The morning shift arrived, a shorter, older official taking over from Green Eyes, who gave me a knowing, strangely intimate look as he headed out the door. There was a woman with him, small and busty in a tightly fitting uniform, carefully made-up. ‘Hello, sister,’ she said coldly, and gestured to me to follow. And in this country where, as I had once explained in an email to my British friend Sarah, no one ever allowed you to carry anything (‘My arms are atrophying’), Whitey was this time left to lug her own bag. The new dispensation.

I knew what to expect now. I’d be led to a car so nondescript it could only belong to the secret police. I’d be taken to an equally anonymous room and there my luggage and clothing would finally be properly searched, the passports and cash immediately discovered. I would be professionally interrogated, my story picked over until, inevitably, it fell apart. And then I would be asked to sign something, and I would be taken to a real cell, with bars, cockroaches and an open toilet, not the soft-focus version of internment I’d been treated to up till now.

Instead, the two walked me out of the deserted airport to the taxi rank. I noticed a woman, swathed like a mummy in white cotton, sitting on the concrete kerb. A little boy lay across her lap, fast asleep, saliva crusting his lips. The female officer rapped on the window of the only cab waiting and what had looked like a bundle of linen stirred and straightened, morphing into a bleary old driver, who automatically pulled the seat forward and groped for his keys.

The male officer turned to me. ‘You will pick up your passport from the Ministry of Immigration, Room 805.’

Oh, sweet Jesus, they were letting me go. Suddenly I rediscovered my lost outrage. ‘What was this all about?’

‘Room 805. Ministry of Immigration. This afternoon.’ Indifferent, they turned and headed back towards the terminal.

Louder now. ‘What’s been going on here?’

The woman officer swivelled and looked back at me. She had a half-smile on her face, and I noticed that her eyebrows had been plucked entirely away, then redrawn in black pencil. ‘We had an information about you.’

I scrabbled at the taxi’s door handle, my hands suddenly shaking so violently I could hardly open it. I gabbled instructions and we headed downtown. Lira was beginning to stir. In a night-chilled courtyard, a first dog barked. The bark was taken up by the dog next door, and their joint yelping relayed from one neighbourhood to another, a widening chorus of syncopated alarm spreading to wake the reluctant, befuddled city.

I sat huddled in the corner of the taxi, trying to control a juddering that had now spread to my legs. One thought occurred. After all those months of velvet-glove treatment, I’d finally been paid the ultimate compliment. Paula Shackleton had been treated like a local.

‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’

That was the running gag of an unlikely friendship forged in a bar down an alley with the cabbagy reek of open drains, hidden away from the Horn of Africa’s punishing highlands light. There’s a long, meandering answer to the question, and then there’s the one-paragraph executive summary, easier to digest but lacking in nuance. I’m opting for the former, and that means jumping back a bit.

The Chicago law firm I worked for in 2004, Grobart & Fitchum – or ‘Grabhard and Fuckem’ as I liked to think of them – was involved in a complicated negotiation between a Swiss department-store chain raising capital to expand into Eastern Europe and a banking client who was running the deal out of their Boston headquarters. The job involved a huge amount of conference calling, and since the Swiss were our overlords, they got to arrange the schedule around their bedtimes. Grobart & Fitchum had flown in a five-man team, and as the days went by, we began to resemble a group of sleep-deprived inmates from Guantanamo Bay, pale-faced and pouchy-eyed. The mood between us was wary: we had been at it long enough to grasp who could stay lucid and keep powering through without enough sleep and who was becoming so loopy their workload would soon have to be added to ours.

Luxury is the knee-jerk consolation prize in this business and Dan, my immediate boss, had automatically booked suites at the Langham, housed in a former Federal Reserve building. There’s something uniquely depressing about being offered a range of services, from the however-many-metres swimming-pool to a range of ‘Chuan scrubs and wraps’ you know you will never get time to use, and the British puritan in me was disgusted by the extravagance. The carping refrain No wonder they’re all obese ran through my head every time I surveyed the breakfast buffet with its mountains of pastries and steaming trays of bacon. The Langham was just like every other gilded cage I’d stayed in, a fitting setting for my botched, interrupted, pointless demi-life.

On the morning in question I was sitting over a plate with a single bread roll placed defiantly in the centre – none of that greasy crap for me, thank you – staring into the middle distance, when a blur in my blind spot crystallised into the shape of a small black man. Compact, neat, a clipped corona of greying curls framing a high, round forehead, he wore a crumpled linen suit in an unusual shade of lemon custard. He stopped as he reached my table and gave me a very direct look from a pair of long-lashed, honey-coloured eyes. I noticed a distinctive spattering of moles around his nose, as though someone had taken a coffee stirrer and flecked espresso in his face.