In High Places

Patiently, Dan repeated the question. This time Duval nodded understanding. He said, 'My mother tell me.'

'What nationality was your mother?'

'She French.'

'Where is your mother now?'

'She die.'

'When did she die?'

'Long time back – Addis Ababa.'

'Who was your father?' Dan asked.

'I not know him.'

'Did your mother tell you about him?'

'He English. A seaman. I never see.'

'You never heard his name?'

A negative headshake.

'Did you have any brothers or sisters?"

'No brother, sister.'

'When did your mother die?'

'Excuse -I not know.'

Reframing the question, Dan asked, 'Do you know how old you were when your mother died?'

'I six year old.'

'Afterwards, who looked after you?'

'I take care myself.'

'Did you ever go to school?'

'No school.'

'Can you read or write?'

'I write name – Henri Duval.'

'But nothing else?'

'I write name,' Duval insisted. 'I show.'

Dan pushed a sheet of copy paper and a pencil across the table. Slowly and in a wavering, childish hand the stowaway signed his name. It was decipherable but only just.

Dan gestured around him. 'Why did you stow aboard this ship?'

Duval shrugged. 'I try find country.' He struggled for words, then added, 'Lebanon not good.'

'Why not good?' Involuntarily Dan used the young stowaway's abbreviated English.

'I not citizen. If police find -I go to jail.'

'How did you get to Lebanon?'

'I on ship.'

'What ship was that?'

'Italian ship. Excuse -I not remember name.'

'Were you a passenger on the Italian ship?'

'I stowaway. I on ship one year. Try get off. No one want.'

Stubby Gates put in, 'As far as I can figure it, 'e was on this Eyetalian tramp, see? They was jist goin' back and forth rahnd the Middle East. So 'e 'ops it at Beirut an' gits on this one. Git it?'

'I get it,' Dan said. Then, to Duval, 'What did you do '" before you were on the Italian ship?'

'I go with men, camels. They give me food. I work. We go Somaliland, Ethiopia, Egypt.' He pronounced the names awkwardly, making a back-and-forth movement with his hand. 'When I small boy, crossing border not matter, no one care. Then when I bigger, they stop – no one want.'

'And that was when you stowed on the Italian ship?' Dan asked. 'Right?'

The young man nodded assent.

Dan asked, 'Do you have any passport, papers, anything to prove where your mother came from?'

'No paper.'

'Do you belong to any country?'

'No country.'

'Do you want a country?'

Duval looked puzzled.

'I mean,' Dan said slowly, 'you want to get of this ship. You told me that.' A vigorous nod, assenting.

'Then you want to have a country – a place to live?'

'I work,' Duval insisted. 'I work good.'

Once more, thoughtfully, Dan Orliffe surveyed the young stowaway. Was his tale of homeless wandering true? Was he, in fact, a castoff, a misborn whom no one claimed or wanted? Was he a man without a country? Or was it all a fabrication, an artful texture of lies and half-truths calculated to elicit sympathy?

The youthful stowaway looked guileless enough. But was he really?

The eyes seemed appealing, but somewhere within them was a veil of inscrutability. Was there a hint of cunning behind it, or was imagination playing tricks?

Dan Orliffe hesitated. Whatever he wrote would, he knew, be hashed over and checked out by the Post's rival afternoon paper, the Vancouver Colonist.

With no immediate deadline, it was up to himself how much time he took in getting the story. He decided to give his doubts a thorough workout.

'Henri,' he asked the stowaway, 'do you trust me?'

For an instant the earlier suspicion returned to the young man's eyes. Then abruptly he nodded.

'I trust,' he said simply.

'All right,' Dan said. 'I think perhaps I can help. But I want to know everything about you, right back from the beginning.' He glanced towards where De Vere was assembling his camera flash equipment. 'We'll take some photographs first, then we'll talk. And don't skip anything, and don't hurry because this is going to take a long time.'

Chapter 5

Henri Duval was still tiredly awake in the galley of the Vastervik.

The man from the newspaper had a tongue with many questions.

It was a puzzle at times, the young stowaway thought, to be certain what he wished. The man asked much, expecting plain words in return. And each answer made was written down quickly upon the sheets of paper before them at the table. It was as if Duval himself were being drawn out through the hurrying pencil point, his life that was past placed carefully in order. And yet, about so much of his life, there was nothing of order, only disconnected pieces. And so many things were hard to tell in plain words – this man's words – or even to remember in just the way they happened.

If only he had learned to read and write, to use pencil and paper for storing things from the mind, as this man and others like him did. Then he, too – Henri Duval – could preserve thoughts and the memory of things past. And not everything would have to stay in his brain, as on a shelf, hoping it would not become lost in forgetfulness, as some of the things he searched for now, it seemed, had done.

His mother had spoken once of schooling. She herself had been taught as a child to read and write. But that was long ago, and his mother had died before any schooling for himself could be begun. After that there was no one else to care what, or whether, he learned.

He frowned, his young face creased, groping for recollection; trying to answer the questions; to remember, remember, remember…

First there had been the ship. His mother had told him of it and it was on the ship that he had been born. They had sailed from Djibouti, in French Somaliland, the day before his birth and he believed that his mother had once told him where the ship was bound, but he had long since forgotten. And if she had ever said what flag the ship flew, that was forgotten too.

The birth had been hard and there was no doctor. His mother became weak and fevered and the ship's captain had turned his vessel, putting back into Djibouti. At the port, mother and child had been taken to the hospital for the poor.

– They had had little money, then or later.

Henri remembered his mother as comforting and gentle. His impression was that she was beautiful, but perhaps this was

'only fancy because the memory of how she looked had faded in his mind and now, when he thought of her, her face was in shadow, with features vague. But she had given him love; that much he was sure of, and he remembered because it was the only love he had ever known.

The early years were disjointed fragments in his mind. He knew that his mother had worked, when she could, to keep them in food, though at times there had been none. He had no recollection of the kind of work his mother had done, though he believed at one time she had been a dancer. The two of them had moved around a good deal – from French Somali-land into Ethiopia, first to Addis Ababa, then Massawa. Two or three times they had made the Djibouti-Addis Ababa trek.

At the beginning they had lived, though meagrely, among other French nationals. Later, as they had become poorer still, the native quarter was all the home they knew. Then, when Henri Duval was six, his mother had died.

After his mother's death his memories were mixed again. For a time – it was hard to be sure how long – he had lived in the streets, begging for food and sleeping at night in whatever hole or corner he could find. He had never gone to the authorities; it had not occurred to him to do so, for among the circle he moved in the police were looked on as enemies, not friends.

Then an elderly Somali, living alone in a hovel in the native quarter, had taken him in and provided shelter of a sort. The arrangement had lasted five years and then, for some reason, the old man left and Henri Duval was alone once more.

This time he drifted from Ethiopia across into British Somaliland, getting work where he could, and for another four years he was variously a shepherd's helper, a goatherd, and a boat boy, eking out a precarious day-to-day existence with wages seldom more than food and shelter.

Then and later, crossing international borders had been simple. There were so many families with children on the move that officials at border points seldom bothered with the children individually. At such moments he would merely attach himself to a family and pass unnoticed through the guards. In time he became adept at it. Even in his late teens his small stature continued to make this possible. Until, at twenty, after travelling with some Arab nomads, he was stopped for the first time and turned back at the borders of French Somaliland.,

Two truths were now revealed to Henri Duval. One: his days of slipping across borders with groups of children were over. Second: French Somaliland, which until this moment he had regarded as his own country, was closed to him. The first thing he had already suspected; the second came as a profound shock.

Fatefully, inevitably, he had encountered one of the fundamentals of modern society: that without documentation – the all-important fragments of paper, the very least of which is a certificate of birth – man is nothing, officially non-existent, and belonging nowhere on the territorially divided earth.

If men and women of learning have, at times, found the proposition hard to accept, to Henri Duval – without schooling of any kind and forced through his years of childhood to live like an unloved scavenger – it had come with shattering impact. The Arab nomads moved on, leaving Duval in Ethiopia, where he now knew he had no right to be either, and for a day and a night he sat huddled near the border crossing point at Hadele Gubo…

… There was a fold of bleached and weathered rock. In its shelter the twenty-year-old youth – still a child in many ways – stayed unmoving and alone… Directly ahead were the arid, boulder-studded plains of the Somalilands, bleak in moonlight and barren in the bright noon sun. And across the plains, sinuously winding like a dun-coloured serpent, was the dust-blown roadway to Djibouti – the final tenuous thread between Henri Duval and his past, between his childhood and his manhood, between his body, undocumented except by its living presence, and the sun-baked coastal city whose fish-smelling alleyways and salt-encrusted wharves he had thought of as his birthplace and his only home.

'Suddenly the desert ahead seemed familiar and inviting ground. And like a creature drawn by some primeval instinct to the place of its birth and mother love, so he longed to return to Djibouti, but now it was out of reach, as so much else was out of reach and would remain so for always.

Then, thirst and hunger at last stirring him, he rose. He turned from the forbidden country, heading north, because he had to head somewhere, towards Eritrea and the Red Sea…

The journey into Eritrea, west coast territory of Ethiopia, was one that he remembered clearly. He remembered, too, that on this journey he first began to steal systematically. Previously he had stolen food, but only in desperation when begging or work had failed. Now he no longer sought work and lived by thievery alone. He still stole food whenever there was an opportunity, and also goods or trinkets which could be sold for small amounts. What little money he got seemed to disappear at once, but always in back of his mind was the thought of accumulating enough to buy a passage on a ship – to some place where he could belong and could begin life again.