Christian Jungersen - The Exception

‘Drive!’

Suddenly he leaps up. He must have thought that someone was sneaking up to the door on his side. Someone who would cut his throat, as they did to his friend. He throws the door open and sticks his gun out.

His back is turned. He has given her a fraction of a second. Iben springs out and runs away at an angle to the truck. To aim at her, he has to move over to her seat.

Her feet are pounding, raising clouds of dust. Now, soon, the rattle of the machine gun. The blood, the thump as she hits the ground. But it’s all strangely quiet. Iben runs and runs.

At last she reaches the human wall. The people part and close around her like dark water. She runs on, falling into the crowd. Then, though her legs keep kicking out, she can move no further. The dark mass that has saved her now holds her. She recognises some of the men and women she has met at football matches or training days or reconciliation meetings. They will starve and die if their rent income from the Luos is reduced further, just as the Luos may die if the rents are not lowered.

Her body melts under her, but many hands hold her upright. They give her water, pour it into her mouth and over her head and body. She drinks from their plastic buckets and calabashes, knowing that it will give her diarrhoea for a week at least. It doesn’t matter.

That ever-alert part of her mind wonders if she shouldn’t move into the densest part of the crowd to observe her colleagues in relative safety. But it’s impossible: all her strength has gone, she is soaked to the skin and still terrified that the armed men in the truck will catch sight of her. Instead she ends up sitting on the ground, leaning against a hard cow-dung wall and holding on to a toothless elderly woman whom she doesn’t recognise, but who behaves as if they were old friends.

Iben has been working in Kenya for an international organisation called Stop Ethnic Cleansing, which tries to remain neutral in the tribal conflicts. In the Nairobi slums, humanitarian organisations tend to be nervous about the Kenyan government’s Luo-friendly policies, and this sometimes makes SEC look pro-Nubian — and hence, presumably, anti-Luo.

The Nubian crowd is not likely to have gathered here simply to save the lives of four strangers, but they would like the kidnapping to fail. They need to ensure that SEC doesn’t withdraw from its reconciliation work in the slums because it fears for the lives of its aid workers. There people have come to fight for their own lives.

Iben’s feet stamp in the dust, as if still wanting to run. She hears her own noisy breathing. Her mind is in a whirl, analysing everything that led up to this.

It was Roberto’s secretary who had received the invitation for SEC staff to meet an important tribal leader. When the boy in the Hong Kong T-shirt came along as a guide to show them the way, Roberto’s secretary had assured them that this was perfectly in order. Had she known about the plan to ambush them and take them hostage all along?

Iben recalls the expression on the secretary’s face (caring), and the tone of her voice (cheerful). No reason to point the finger at her. Except … she knew what she was doing. Of course. She is a Luo and, since everyone around her believes in tribal allegiances, so must she. She is bound to ask herself if other people will support her family and their way of life. Or are they out to destroy them? Any talk about impartiality would sound like treachery.

The sound of a car siren causes a scare. At last, the police are coming.

Iben climbs up the wall she has been leaning against, finding footholds on protruding bits of the framework of branches. It is so low that there is only half a metre to climb, but in the shade of the overhanging tin roof her white face is less obvious.

An open truck full of policemen pulls up. Another truckload stops on the other side of the crowd. The hostages and their guards remain as they were when she ran off. All sit and stand in exactly the same positions. Even with the police here, the prisoners look cowed.

The howl of the sirens is piercing, but Iben feels relieved — until she realises what’s going on, that is. The police are attacking the crowd with long, white truncheons. Several of the beaten Nubians are too badly injured to get up again.

Iben wants to rush to the officer in charge and cry out ‘No! Don’t! They want to set us free. You’ve got it wrong! Don’t hit them.’ She wants to stop the beatings before someone is crippled for life.

Her toothless companion clings to her and tries to make Iben follow her into the network of sewer-paths between the houses. She speaks all the time, a fast, meaningless babble, but Iben cannot face running away from the crowd that turned up to help her when her and her companions’ lives were in danger. The woman throws her arms round Iben and weighs her down, sobbing helplessly.

Already at a distance, Iben shouts at the police that they’re hitting the wrong people. But the road has emptied quickly, as the crowd flees into the fine-meshed network of alleyways. The police won’t chase them there. Only the injured are left behind, scattered here and there on the road. And in the middle of it all, the large white SEC truck stands untouched.

A few metres away from the police, Iben begins to think again. She stops shouting and glances quickly over her shoulder. Is the old woman still around? Is there a place to disappear into?

Then two policemen grab hold of her. They don’t hit her, just march her off to join her fellow hostages and their captors. She tries to explain what’s happened. Several times. Still they escort her back to the seat she managed to get away from.

Cathy buries her face in her hands. She whispers to Roberto, her voice despairing, ‘It’s you who should know about the police. They protect these men. You should have known.’

She seems to be brimming with a mixture of tears, anger and something else, something new at least to Iben. Cathy keeps repeating herself, mumbling like the old bag lady who hangs around on the street-corner near the DCGI office. ‘It’s your fault. You’re in charge. It’s your job to protect us.’

Iben steals a glance at Roberto’s face, but it looks blank.

Two policemen heave the dead driver’s body onto the back of the truck.

The way ahead has been cleared and now the hostage-takers can drive on.

One evening, at dusk, Iben was walking along the suburban streets. It wasn’t long after her father’s death. The snow reflected the blue-tinged winter light. She was breathing easily, listening to the snow crystals crunching under her boots. Beneath a fruit tree, its branches covered with snow, two women were calling their cats. There must be others in this quiet town, who came to call their cats at nightfall.

‘Kitty kitty cat. Pretty kitten, come to Mummy.’

Iben suddenly felt that all these women were calling her dead father. All around town, mothers straightened their backs and got up from their kitchen tables or from the corner of their sofas or from double beds with only a single duvet and a tear-stained pillow. They got up and stood in lit doorways, calling out into Roskilde’s still darkness.

‘Kitty kitty, come to Mummy. Come inside. Kitty-cat, come to me.’

Iben is rooting around in the discount boxes at Company’s, looking for blouses. Next to one box she sees bits of fur that look like the dyed coats of cats.

Could they be?

She has already been to seven shops without finding anything that would do. All this tramping around shops is Gunnar’s fault. He doesn’t appear to be interested in how people dress, but he fell for Malene and she both knows and cares about clothes.

While Iben examines a cream-coloured blouse to see if it’s shaped properly at the waist, she tells herself that it doesn’t matter in the slightest what she wears.