J. Ledgard - Submergence

Aziz’s hands were unblemished. James got a good look at them when they rested on his broken nose. The fingers of a pianist: manicured, long, thin, alien. it was peculiar how Islamists were set apart by the length of their fingers the way moustaches used to set apart the maniacs of Nazi Germany and the Kremlin and thick necks the lesser apparatchiks.

There was a click and the nose was set with a thumb and forefinger. Aziz took a step back.

‘Straight enough.’

‘For an infidel,’ James said.

Aziz wagged a finger, but his face was friendly, not at all sallow or vulpine.

The doctor indicated his injuries on a wall chart of the human body that had the names of bones written in English and Somali. There was no X-ray machine.

‘What about the blood in my urine?’

‘Not serious. Drink a lot, Mr Water.’

‘My name is James More.’

Aziz gave a hard little laugh. ‘More? What kind of name is that?’

‘It has its history. What about my groin?’

‘That will heal. I will call you Mr Water.’

‘I have to get out of here. Can you help?’

‘No,’ said the doctor, smiling.

The nurse floated into the surgery again and stitched the cuts on him under Aziz’s direction. Her veil brushed his face. Her breath was scented. She was scented. This time, she was wearing latex gloves. Aziz examined the stitches, nodded approvingly, and the nurse left through the door with the no guns sticker.

‘My Somali wife,’ Aziz said. ‘It is not proper that she approaches you, but this is medicine. We do what we must. Come sit with me.’

Aziz helped him out onto the balcony. It was empty. There was the sound of prayers from the ice-cream mosque and the hammering of a small diesel generator.

‘I have been given a box of your belongings. We will have to sell them to pay for your care,’ Aziz said. ‘Do you agree?’

‘I want to return to Nairobi.’

‘If Allah permits. Open your mouth. I forgot about your teeth.’

Aziz gave him something resembling a dental pick. With some direction, James picked gravel and tooth chips from his gums and spat the blood and bits into a metal bowl.

He spent the next days on a cot in the surgery. Occasionally he saw the shape of Aziz’s wife behind the door, just standing there. He scratched at the white paint in the windows and saw battle wagons parked in the street and a guard sitting in the shade of a mango tree with a Kalashnikov that was inlaid with beryl and glittered.

One evening Aziz brought a plate of bread and pieces of goat meat and they shared a meal.

‘I’m sorry for what’s happened to you, Mr Water,’ Aziz said. ‘So many of the mujahideen are uneducated. There should be a ban on taking in boys who cannot read. They need to study the Koran themselves in order to decide on their sacrifice. There should also be a ban on injecting the suicide bombers with drugs meant to limit their ability to think.’

‘They do that?’

‘I once saw it in Mogadishu. I was very ashamed. I am told they do it in Pakistan. But Pakistan … It is not a good practice.’

‘Why are you talking to me?’

‘You will be gone soon, one way or another.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Aziz squeezed his hand. ‘They will not kill you. Yusuf made a promise.’

They were the kindest words that had been spoken to him in his captivity. ‘Thank you.’

‘There is no one to talk to here with an education. Besides,’ Aziz’s voice dropped to a murmur, ‘you cannot trust Somalis. You give them money to buy medicine for the clinic and they send it to their family. You give them phone credit and they use it to call other relatives. We foreigners do not understand how attached Somalis are to themselves. The true religion of a Somali is Somalia. I tell you they are weak in all the practical parts of the jihad. There was a boy among those who sleep here who would without hesitation have given his life for the jihad. The other day his uncle came to visit. Whatever he said was worse than death or hell to the boy; in a minute he set down his gun and walked away, refusing to say a word to anyone.’

James nodded. Somalia was irregular. Hardly any foreigners visited it, yet there were Somalis all over the world. There was internet in one neighbourhood, in the next the people were dying of thirst. You could receive money through a wire transfer, but you could not keep your child alive.

On another evening, Aziz asked about water.

‘What do you suggest we do about the wells in Kismayo?’

‘That is what I came here to find out.’

‘The water is too expensive for the poor.’

He had prepared for this moment in Nairobi and in the dark before becoming Mr Water.

‘Does the local authority have control over all of the water sources?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You need to drive out the water profiteers by any means necessary. Once all the wells are under the administration they need to be marked on a map and the details of each put in a public record.’

Aziz pulled out a notepad and a biro and made notes in Arabic. It was difficult for him. He held the biro like a stirring spoon.

‘You need to know the depth of each well and the quality of the water in it. The closer the well is to the sea, the more likely it is to be brackish. In the slums, it might be contaminated with sewage. You need to know how many people are using it. You plot all of this on the map. Then you can start to think about setting a fair price for each well.’

‘What if the people still cannot afford to pay?’

‘They should get the water at no cost. You will need a ration card system. In return for clean water, families will build drains and rainwater tanks. The local authority will have to monitor the water supply and educate the women in water conservation. Eventually, it will need to drill boreholes, secure the spring water and build a sewage treatment plant. I can help you with all of this.’

‘You already are,’ Aziz said, and took his hand.

Aziz had had three wives. The first was Iraqi; she had died. The second worked as a doctor in Riyadh. The third was the Somali. His Iraqi wife had belonged to a Muslim sect that retained pagan elements of star worship. She was fifteen when they married, eighteen when she died giving birth. There was no question Aziz was sincere in the antenatal and postnatal care he provided in the Bari slum, which spilled out onto one of the beaches. It had tripled in size since the Islamists had taken control of Kismayo.

‘In such a place,’ Aziz said, ‘only the air is free. There is no comparison between life there and life in Riyadh. Hardly a day goes by without a baby in my care dying of some curable sickness. The people have no work. They have not enough food. They have no school and this is something we want to correct. Three families share a shack,’ he went on, ‘there is terror of fire, especially on hot days. A spark flies on the wind and lights the palm thatch and paper. People are burned alive. It is worse when it rains. Then the mud mixes in with the waste from the latrines. I do believe,’ his voice rose, ‘with so many people packed in such conditions, Somalia will generate a plague that could spread across the world.’

‘Cholera?’

‘A new plague.’

‘You could make a weapon of it,’ he said.

Aziz reached over and slapped him in the face, just one slap. ‘I am a doctor.’

His face flushed with anger. ‘You keep company with killers.’

It was true. Aziz had clinical knowledge and served others, yet he also had a weakness for sermons he could not quite hear, for battle banners, for scimitars flashing far away. His venture was for the jihad, not for humanitarian action. He missed his family, he loved them, it was not easy to live with the secret of being a mujahid. He was choleric. He had fits of rage and the division within him intensified the hatred. Many sentences would begin, I cannot allow the pigs to …