"Frei-TheGodsend" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frei Urs)

URS FREI

THE GODSEND

IN THE ONE-ROOM TERMInal the heat was intolerable. An air conditioner resting in
a window licked at the pavement outside with a tongue of rust, while its
blackened vents inside made one surmise an ancient rupture. The attendant was a
black man in gray dungarees, small and hard, as if kiln-dried in the line of
duty. He seemed oblivious to the heat, and confirmed placidly that the air
conditioner was out of order. Fortunately noon was still an hour away, and on
the west side, the runway side of the terminal, was a strip of shade wide enough
to wait in. Half an hour later, when it had shrunk by half, the attendant came
out to confirm that the plane would be late, and at that moment Arthur Nkobe
savored the unusual clarity and certainty of his premonition that everything
would become much worse before the day ended. This would only be in keeping,
after all, with the general deterioration of things since his arrival from
Khartoum two weeks ago to administer drought relief in the southern Sudan. He
had found awaiting him in Juba a suite of air-conditioned offices, a
well-prepared staff -- but no supplies. The French, British, and Americans had
promised aid, but the French supplies had never left Paris, the British supplies
were lost among shipments to Ethiopia and the Sahel, and now the Americans,
instead of aid, were sending their own administrator to decide how it should be
distributed.

He was affected strangely by the heat. Several times already he had been sure
that he could see the plane; twice he had turned to his assistant, Cecil Deng to
point it out, only to find when he turned back that it had disappeared. He was
so affected that he felt no embarrassment; he felt only now and then winds of
irritation. He had no one to vent them on, and Cecil was too experienced to give
him an excuse. Cecil wore a frown of concentration and held his head cocked
toward the six Dinka chieftains conversing several yards away, in their even,
musical and slightly female voices. Arthur Nkobe was irritated again, since his
assistant, who had been hired primarily as an interpreter, hardly understood a
word of what they said.

And yet he was a Dinka himself, his name originally Kiir Jal, and could be
distinguished from the chiefs only because his suit happened to fit. He had
moved north when he was a child. Arthur Nkobe could not decide whether Cecil's
unease in their presence meant fear or contempt, or something of both. Certainly
he had been taken aback to find that for this meeting with the representative of
America the Dinka had decided to wear suits. Perhaps they embarrassed him, but
to Arthur the tall slender chieftains with their prominent bones managed in
their innocence, in spite of the sleeves that came halfway up their forearms,
not to look ridiculous. But he did not understand why, with their people in such
a plight, they had made the effort to be here. Cecil Deng could only shrug.

The plane appeared at last out of nowhere in the middle of the sky, and in a
minute landed on the runway in a cloud of heat and stopped a hundred feet away.