The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
a line like a mantra – ‘deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil’ – as the earth fell away. Ten minutes out from Nairobi and the great gate of clouds opened out, with the pillars of Mount Kenya to the north and Kilimanjaro to the south. Our path led over patchwork peasant lands, sequinned with tin hut roofs glinting in the sun. Further out were empty, arid plains, broken up only by smooth brown kopjes and the capillaries of seasonal streams that dissipated into stains of green against the ochre and white desert. Look down and you’d see herds of goats and camels scatter in unison like shoals of fish. Even in this modern day, out here whole grid squares on the tactical pilotage charts were half blank and marked with the words RELIEF DATA INCOMPLETE. They might as well have written ‘here be monsters’. The flights themselves scared the hell out of me before we’d even landed in the eye of another crisis. ‘I repeat, six souls on board, do you read…?’ Often there was no answer. The pilots called Sub-Sahara’s airspace ‘the cone of silence’. I couldn’t fully appreciate the idea until the day I entered a control tower following a battle at an airport and saw brain, hair and skull fragments all over the walls. Every time we flew into a cloud I’d hold my breath and think of all the UFO junk we might be on a collision course with: ghost flights, alcoholic Ukrainians shifting cargo, Zimbo arms smugglers, overflying tourist charters, medevacs, drug couriers, patrolling MiGs. There was the tropical weather too, in which minutes after observing clear skies up ahead one saw elevating thousands of feet up out of thin air a black storm with the head of a sledgehammer.
On those flights I’d look down from the sky at takeoffs and landings and see the silhouette of our little aircraft ripple over pulverized cities, refugee camps, the acetylene-white flashes of anti-aircraft fire and countries rich only in lost hopes and broken dreams. What comes to mind when I think of that time in my life are the words of Isaiah 18, which I’d read in the Gideons Bibles I’d found in dozens of seedy hotel rooms where I spent so much of my life on the road; ‘Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia…Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down.’ That passage makes me think of my circle of friends, the journalists I knew in those years. We were like the swift messengers in Africa.
Sometimes I remember it all again. I am back in that valley at night. I see the silent panic on the livid faces around me with the gunfire roaring in the fog. Or I’m at a field hospital. I put my notebook down to help lift a casualty with his brains spilling personality all over the stretcher, when a mortar bomb slams into the triage room, liquefying patients inside. Or in the famine camp, where at my feet a child crouches like a frog with eyes clouded white as moonstones. And the American nurse is whispering in my ear, ‘We say the ones like that are circling the drain. You know, like a spider in your bath?’
It all comes back to me. Overnighters, all-nighters, hitching rides on tanks busting down palace gates, sipping dictators’ champagne, scoops and whores and house arrests, herograms, smelly socks and Caterpillar boots, the shits, deadlines, dead on arrivals, bouts of amoebae and malaria remembered fondly like adventures, beriberi, organ failure, Stalin’s organs, brain damage, gas gangrene, coke cut with pig laxative from condoms smuggled in the bowels of living men, oral rehydration salts, satellite feeds, food aid, baby milk, mass burials through a Nikon lens, Huey chopper rides, the pure adrenaline of being in fallen cities decorated with floral mortar bursts and tracers in the sky.
My entire life seems to have been either a prelude or an aftermath to moments such as these. Sometimes for a while I can submerge them and forget. But without warning, the hog-tied corpses of memory bob to the surface once more and then I recognize how much I’ve loved and missed those days. I suppose this is why people hoard their mementoes. Mine are sundry keepsakes of war and failed states, loot and charms, an odd collection of dictators’ portraits, Red Cross press releases, permits from guerrilla armies. Plaintive letters from interpreters left behind after the news went cold. Snaps of friends, gazing over ruined cityscapes, brandishing weapons, smoking joints, posing in mock disguises and states of intoxication, arm in arm. An Ethiopian chopper pilot’s visor helmet; river pebbles from Serbia; a concrete fragment of the Berlin Wall. A reject news photo of a Liberian, his skull trepanned by a bullet and daubed over with a Day-Glo smiley face and the caption ‘Have a nice day!’ Buried in a drawer are autopsy reports and black-bordered funeral orders of service. There are voices on tape; if I stand in the next room and listen through an open door, I can ignore their metallic distortion and imagine them to be young and alive once more. All this stuff hangs around like bad luck in my house. I’d throw it all out if it weren’t so much a part of me.
Sometimes, the stories themselves can take on their own disturbing vitality. Inside my mind, they play out the what-ifs and maybes, throwing up fresh detail or facts I can no longer pin down. Or they spill over into my innocent recollections. Rows of silent infants with swollen kwashiorkor bellies gatecrash the childhood movie of my grandpa tying his runner beans to bamboo stakes in his garden. A gang of executed men in a banana grove falls to the floor as I’m flicking through pictures of my summers at Oxford. All these memories are unfinished business. They seep out of the hidden recesses and coagulate. I confuse the happy ones and the bad ones, where one fuck-up ended and the other began: childhood, or my thirtieth birthday, until I can no longer determine if certain events that still haunt me are either real or imagined, or just excuses for drinking too much, or my yelling rages, or not bothering to get out of bed in the mornings. And sometimes, there are mornings when I get up just so that I can stare at the wall of the room all day.
I recall countless mornings, rooms and faces. A hut in the suburbs of Nairobi, where the white ants ate the timber walls and the tin roof popped and sighed with the heating and cooling of the days. Back at home on the Indian Ocean beach, like a child again under my mother’s care. I have had hours, dawns, waking in strange beds and looking out of windows at deserts, unfamiliar cityscapes, wintry rain, at the airliners coasting in like sharks to land at Heathrow. All that time stuck pacing around in rooms. And when I wasn’t there I was on a road or a flight to some destination that made sense at the time even if it doesn’t now. Checking in, checking out. The circular journeys that brought me right back to the point where I had started. It is as if I have slept through an afternoon and, waking, found that it is already dark. Time passes. Yet I sometimes sense that no time has passed at all. Sometimes, it occurs to me that if I picked up the phone right now and dialled my old home number the person answering it at the other end would be myself, aged twenty-three.
But it started long before that.
I was going to tell you war stories but I’ve realized that if I want to make sense of them there is a wider tale that follows an arc through the generations. You see, it started when I broke down after my father’s death. Suddenly I found myself taking stock of everything that had ever happened to me. I remembered the people and the things I had loved, or feared. I recalled my ancestors and my childhood. I lived through my wars again on the journey to recovery, in what the British combat photographer Don McCullin has described as the ‘peace process’. At first I wandered without purpose, but luckily I discovered Peter Davey’s diaries in the Zanzibar chest. Sometime later I tucked the papers under my arm and went to Arabia. There I followed the story page by page, mile by mile, and it provided me with a golden thread that guided me out of the labyrinth where I was lost. And for this reason I can’t speak of my own story without also telling you about Davey. In these pages I am going to take you to Africa and Arabia and a few other places besides, in different years and over centuries. Forgive me when it proves difficult to keep up, but you’ll just have to trust me. For now I want you to keep in mind a day in April 1947. We are in an emerald-green valley beneath the craggy peaks of high Arabia. The land has fallen silent but for the sound of birdsong and the gurgling of water in the cool mountain stream. Youth and innocence are dead. The broad-winged shadow of a vulture circles over three men. One body is that of an African, a sheikh’s slave, lying riddled with bullet wounds. Nearby sprawls the figure of Davey. The translucent bone haft of a silver jambiya dagger protrudes from his chest and blood soaks his khaki tunic. And standing over the two of them is my father.