Dogstar Rising

Chapter Nine




The ghostly outline of the Binbashi was lit up by strings of coloured lights, making the steamer resemble a sketch by an artist with an unsteady hand. Like Makana’s awama, it was more a floating building than a ship. The entrance was reinforced by a wall and a gate complete with a collection of doormen deep in earnest discussion who duly ignored Makana as he entered. A path led down to a short gangway that brought him into a lobby, gaudily decorated with coloured tinsel, mirrors and a revolving glass ball hanging from the ceiling. Music played over speakers everywhere you went, providing a non-stop soundtrack to your experience. Makana counted the names of four restaurants, but he had an idea there were more of them hidden around the vessel somewhere. He followed the signs to the upper deck and entered a long stately room with low lighting.

Talal had managed to exchange his customary T-shirt for something with a collar, and he was even wearing a jacket that looked as if it had been through a grain thresher and was at least two sizes too small for him. The sleeves came up to his forearms. They were sitting at a table on the riverside. Through the window the city lights swam like luminous fish in the black water. The woman of his dreams had a high bust and creamy skin. She wore a tight blue dress covered in ribbons and bows that emphasised her full figure. She looked as though she would eat Talal alive.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘Bunny, this is the man you’ve heard so much about.’

‘He really doesn’t stop talking about you,’ she said, holding out a limpid hand. There was a playful lilt to her voice and her eyes lingered for a moment on Makana.

‘Please sit,’ Talal urged, as jumpy as a scalded cat.

‘Thank you,’ Makana said.

‘Actually,’ she giggled, ‘I hear your name all the time now that you are helping my father.’

‘Yes, how is that coming along?’ Talal chimed in.

‘It’s too early to say.’

The place was almost empty and they seemed to be surrounded by a swarm of beefy waiters, snapping their fingers, holding out chairs, lifting up and setting down cutlery, handing out menus. Makana reached for his cigarettes.

Bunny prompted, ‘Talal.’

‘Oh,’ Talal said, looking up from his menu, which was big enough to hide a family of four. ‘If you don’t mind. Bunny doesn’t like smoke.’

‘No problem.’ Makana replaced the cigarette in the packet, put the packet back in his pocket and instead took the menu that was thrust under his nose. After staring at it for a time he realised it made no sense to him. The dishes all had foreign names. He took another look around. Low lighting was generally a bad sign in any restaurant. It implied you were not meant to be able to see what you were eating. The empty tables seemed to encourage this line of thinking. Eating was a serious pastime in this country. Not that such trivia affected the happy couple. As Bunny chattered on, Makana realised this was Talal’s idea of trying to impress her. He tried to put his doubts aside. By the sound of it they were planning to taste every available dish. Bunny was running down the menu ticking off one after another as a distracted waiter tried to take note. Makana had a feeling this was going to be a long evening.

‘What about you?’ Talal asked.

‘Oh, why don’t you order for me?’

It was the right thing to say, and allowed Bunny to spend some time playfully measuring him up with her eye to decide what he might like. She clearly liked attention, particularly the male kind. While the young couple chattered between themselves, discussing the merits of one dish over another, the waiter stood tapping his pen against his pad impatiently as if he had a hundred customers waiting for him elsewhere. Makana was about to excuse himself to go outside and have a cigarette, when a shadow crossed before him and another man pulled up the chair opposite.

‘So there you are, we were beginning to get worried.’

The newcomer was around the same age as Makana, in his forties. He wore a colourful African shirt and a broad smile. As he sat down he placed not one but two large mobile telephones on the table and reached into the air to snap his fingers for the waiter. If a moment ago Makana had had good reasons for wanting to leave, they had just multiplied.

Once upon a time Mohammed Damazeen was an artist, a painter with a sideline in the import-export business to keep him in fancy shirts. Makana observed the look of complicity that passed between Damazeen and Talal, whose face was a picture of carefree innocence. A senior waiter in a black jacket appeared, cheerless and balding, and with a look of disdain on his face that had been perfected by years of waiting on tables.

‘You two know each other, of course,’ said Talal.

‘Oh, we have known each other for years,’ smiled Damazeen, before turning to the waiter and demanding wine be brought.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ A cold sneer creased the waiter’s face. ‘We only serve alcohol to non-Muslims.’

‘It’s all right,’ protested Bunny. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’ The idea of wine clearly scandalised her. She gave Talal a hard stare, but he had an absent look on his face that Makana had seen before and also appeared to have lost the ability to speak.

‘Look,’ Damazeen summoned the waiter closer. ‘I’m a friend of the owner. Call Ayad Zafrani and ask his permission. Yallah, go! Tell him, Mo Damazeen asked for wine.’ He turned his back on him in a gesture of contempt. The waiter, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of disturbing his boss with such a trivial matter, tugged nervously at the cuffs of his jacket. He addressed the back of Damazeen’s head.

‘I’m sure there is no problem, ya basha. If you wish for wine, I shall bring it personally.’ He spun on his heels and clapped his hands, causing four other waiters to start fighting over a bottle of Omar Khayyam, which was passed along from hand to hand with all the care of nitroglycerine. It took a while for them to find a corkscrew. They poured two glasses in the end. One for Damazeen and then, at his insistence, one for Makana, who had no intention of touching it.

‘Still stirring up scandal, I see.’

Damazeen let out a laugh, throwing back his head.

‘You see how well he knows me?’

Talal grinned, clearly relieved. Across the other side of the room Makana caught a glimpse of a bulky man in a grey suit. He had a shaven head and steel-rimmed glasses that glinted in the light. He glanced in their direction as the head waiter leaned in to whisper in his ear.

‘How is it that you are in business with the Zafrani brothers?’

‘Oh, you know how it is in my line of work. We meet so many people.’ Damazeen’s smile fanned out again as he raised his glass. ‘Let us drink to the old days. It’s been a long time.’

Makana lit a cigarette, ignoring the glare he got from Talal. Bunny was too flustered about the wine to make an issue of it.

Damazeen had never really been Makana’s friend. A long time ago he had been part of a circle of artists in Khartoum that his wife Muna had mixed with when she was a student. He recalled long, carefree evenings sitting in one house or another, discussing politics and art. They even had a painting of Damazeen’s on the wall of their home. A swirl of blues and greys. A mythical bird accompanied by lines of calligraphy. Makana couldn’t pretend to have an understanding of art but Muna liked it. It all seemed so long ago. Damazeen had been the young upcoming artist. Nasra hadn’t even been born then. Another time. An age of innocence it seemed now, when everything was what it claimed to be, and there was something called hope.

When he had first landed in Cairo, Makana discovered Damazeen was already part of the exile community. Their paths crossed a couple of times. By then Makana had lost his job, his wife and child, and his home, and he was discovering that no one makes it on their own. It was the nature of exile. With flight you lost your surroundings, the context in which your previous life existed. No matter what you did you could never get that back, but you could meet people in the same situation and that was a help, of sorts.

Eager to put the awkward start behind them, Talal was keen to make amends. ‘Mo has been telling us all about the new centre he is planning to build. It’s going to be a retreat for international artists from all over the place.’

‘Sounds wonderful,’ Makana said.

Mo, as he was known in London and Paris, had put on weight. His hair was threaded with whorls of white now and his shirt was tight across an expanded midriff. All of this only added to his sense of his own presence. He carried himself like a celebrity. In the early days he had been something of a firebrand who talked of fighting the regime through art and politics. A charismatic character. The media loved him. In Cairo’s cultural circles he had played the ingenuous country bumpkin, the exotic cousin to their Arab reserve. As far as most Cairenes were concerned, Africa was a distant and very dark continent inhabited by savages. The art world was no more enlightened than most. In those days Damazeen could have marched on stage with a leopard-skin over his shoulder and they would have adored him. As the years went by and the regime showed no sign of stepping down, Damazeen began to tone down the act. Murmurs of compromise circled. He talked of longing for home, returning to his roots. From there to fully fledged apologist was but a short skip and a jump. The old regime had abandoned its hard-line beginnings, he claimed. Some believed him. Others had their doubts. Rumours circulated that he was an informer. When the Americans rained cruise missiles down on Khartoum in retaliation for the attacks on US Embassies in East Africa, Damazeen appeared on state television to voice his outrage. It was a public declaration of his ties to the regime.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Come on, lighten up!’ Damazeen carried himself like a mediocre actor who believed his hour had come. ‘We have a duty to encourage talent, which is why Talal has got to attend the Viennese Conservatory.’ He patted Talal on the shoulder.

‘You’re going to fund him?’

‘Why not? What better cause is there than nurturing young artists?’

It worried Makana to see them together. Talal was impressionable, and a few stories about how close Damazeen was to his father would go a long way, and this made him uncomfortable. He also wondered what the connection was between Damazeen and the Zafrani brothers? They enjoyed a reputation as one of the most ruthless organised-crime families. The stories of beheadings, of victims being left buried up to their necks in the desert, or pulled apart by horses, sounded like theatrical replays of medieval practices, but Makana knew enough to take them seriously.

A waiter appeared and Bunny nodded. She and Talal got up to go and inspect the grill on the far side of the room, perhaps also to leave the two men alone to work out their differences.

‘So, you’re here on art business?’

‘You never give up, do you?’ Damazeen laughed in slow guffaws. ‘A man of virtue, convinced that all around him is darkness and corruption. You should take a look at yourself sometime.’

There were rumours of fat commissions on contracts supplying the military with trucks. Damazeen had always denied it, of course, claiming he was simply selling more paintings than anyone else. He had a mysterious buyer in the Gulf. But everyone knew it would take an awful lot of canvas to pay for his new lifestyle. Now that he was friends with the regime he spent his time with entrepreneurs, army men, unsavoury types who met in shabby hotels and drank only when they thought no one was looking, prayed when they thought they were.

‘I had doubts, just like you, but things have changed. Now there are opportunities. Great opportunities. The boom has just begun. There is enough for everybody now that petroleum is finally flowing from the wells. The Chinese are building roads, pipelines, refineries. And they are not the only ones. Malaysians, Indians, Turks. We are on our way to becoming a developed nation.’

‘A few people making themselves obscenely rich doesn’t make a developed nation.’

Damazeen reached for his glass and twirled the wine around it. ‘You should get over yourself, you know? And stop poisoning the boy’s mind with all your paranoia. He’s talented.’

The sound of Bunny’s laughter echoed across the room. The cook had provided her with another appreciative audience. A handsome man in a tall white hat, he seemed to amuse her, flirting openly, wielding a carving knife in the air like a mad dervish.

‘Why did you turn against me? I never understood. We were friends once.’

‘That was a long time ago. Things change.’

‘You don’t trust me. I get it. But you can’t live here in isolation for ever, like some exiled king awaiting his glorious return home. It’s over. The world has moved on. The sooner you accept that, the better for you, believe me.’

‘Why are you really here?’

‘I told you,’ said Damazeen, refilling his glass. ‘I’m here to support Talal.’

‘That sounds very generous.’

‘I like to help people,’ Damazeen said. His eyes were tinged with red from the wine. ‘What if I said I could help you?’

‘I’d tell you to go and peddle your stories elsewhere.’

‘You haven’t even heard what I am offering.’

‘I don’t need to hear. And stay away from the boy.’

‘What if I told you I can give you your life back?’

But Makana had heard enough. As he pushed back the chair to get to his feet, Damazeen tried to block his way, putting a hand on his arm to restrain him, which was a mistake. Hassan Saleh, the man who taught Makana self-defence in the police force, had been trained in East Germany. Descended from a long line of wrestlers in the Nuba Mountains, Hassan was short and squat and as hard to budge as a well-oiled boulder. For some reason they had become friends and Makana had been one of his best pupils. One of the first things he taught Makana was to act on instinct. When an opportunity is set before you, don’t think, just act. Makana acted. He grasped hold of Damazeen’s hand and twisted it in a clockwise direction, pressing outwards. It didn’t take much force. Damazeen was off balance to begin with and the wine probably didn’t help. He lurched back into the next table, tipped over a chair before tumbling to the ground. The bald waiter raised his eyes to the heavens. All that fuss about wine and see how it ends. Still, it pained Makana to see the disappointment on Talal’s face. He patted him on the shoulder and smiled at Bunny, who twirled a ribbon around her finger.