To Asmara

by Thomas Keneally

  “Good afternoon, good afternoon,” he said in English, the English of older Africans who once had lived in British colonies. His voice was melodious and breathy. “Ah, I had heard there was goat!”

  You couldn’t guess what series of Red Sea genetic contingencies had made his face; what balance of Semitic, Hamitic, Cushitic, Turkish, European was represented there. He was about sixty years old, an age most Eritreans didn’t manage to achieve, and had an old-fashioned gravity.

  “May I introduce myself? My name is Salim Genete. I am an Eritrean, but I live in Saudi Arabia, in Medina, where I do business and help—as far as I can—the cause of my Eritrean brothers and sisters.” He eyed the bowl of meat. “Ai-ai-ai! How remarkable!”

  He, too, set to work on the injera and the bluish goat flesh-and-bone left in the bowl.

  We introduced ourselves. When it was the Englishwoman’s turn, she used her unadorned name. Henry said, maybe to embarrass her, “Julia’s a Lady or a Dame or some such.”

  The question of what Lady Ashmore-Smith should be called all at once seemed to dominate. But I didn’t even know how Henry had found out about it. I hadn’t told him.

  “Please,” said the Englishwoman. “I am not a Dame. I do hope this business is not going to become an issue!” Then she uttered her real name.

  “Oh,” said Salim Genete, considering the wad of goat meat he held in his hand, “so your husband was a baronet? Or a life peer?”

  The question caused Henry and me to exchange grins and a few archings of the eyebrows. It wasn’t the sort of matter you’d expect rebels generally to involve themselves in.

  “My husband,” Lady Julia told Salim Genete, “was a District Commissioner in the Sudan. He was first knighted. But after retirement he was involved in Foreign Office work in what was then Rhodesia, and was made a life peer. So I have been both Lady Julia and Lady Ashmore-Smith, and since my poor husband, Denis, died seven years ago, and since I have little right to any title myself, I suggest, Mr. Genete, that you call me Julia.”

  “Not at all,” said Salim, a stickler. “I know from my youth, when Massawa on the Red Sea was a British port and when my father entertained distinguished guests, that Lady Julia is the correct mode of address for the wife or relict of a life peer. And that if you were simply the wife of a knight, the proper mode would instead be Lady Ashmore-Smith. I’m not incorrect in my memory of these forms, am I?”

  Lady Julia herself seemed amused.

  “You have it absolutely exactly,” she told him. “Though it is strange to hear such a rundown on the protocols of address from a member of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.”

  I tried to memorize these nuances of title Salim Genete had acquainted us with, for my future dealings with the Englishwoman. I could see the girl smiling faintly but engaged in the same effort.

  “And so,” said Salim, eating energetically, copiously, but giving an impression of restraint, of appetite under control, “you have found our corner of the globe and our struggle. Do you think our guest house a little impoverished?”

  Lady Julia denied it.

  “Let me tell you,” Salim Genete continued, “that sadly this is an Eritrean palace. One day we will enter our holy and much desired city of Asmara. There, evening prayer will be called from the Eritrean mosque, and benedictions from the cathedral. And you will see better things then. But for the moment … I am afraid this is the best. Yet I trust you will discover we are not an uncultivated people. Politics have done this to us. The politics of other folk. Imagine then what politics do to the defenseless seed in the earth. Ai-ai-ai! But come, eat these delicious lentils and the goat meat!”

  Moka and Salim Genete continued to eat after the rest of us had stopped. Soon they noticed, however, that for the visitors the meal was over.

  “Ai,” said Salim. “The meat is good for my friend Moka. It builds him up against malaria, which is very dangerous in his case because of his wounds. Shall we drink our tea in the open?”

  Outside, on stone benches draped with colored cloth and understuffed cushions, we drank from a thermos of frighteningly sweet tea. Salim squinted at the sun through the camouflaging trellis covered with some flowering plant. “From Khartoum to Kuwait the just are asleep,” he murmured. “Because it is so very hot …”

  It was at the height of this African heat that I noticed particular Eritreans—bureaucrats, I suppose you’d call them—in the defile below the guest house. In oddments of Western clothing, often paramilitary in appearance, they would emerge singly now and then from a particular hole in the ground and move toward another. For the first time I began to spot the cunningly tucked away windows and air vents of these places. There was, for example, a bunker high up on the slope to our right, and another below us. From it I could hear an occasional burst of conversation, a groan, a snore.

  One official who moved toward us up the defile was a lean woman with a turban loosely tied around her dark neck-length hair. She wore an Arab-style shawl around her neck, a striped shirt and jeans. At the large drums of fresh water just below the guest house she paused. She found an empty milk can and filled it from the drum on her left, the one intended for washing rather than drinking.

  Carrying the can of water in both hands, she climbed to the bunker off to the side of the guest house, the bunker I’d barely discerned ten minutes before but which now seemed obvious, permanent as an apartment block.

  I was engrossed by her easy glide. All the people of the Horn are impressive movers, even though they mightn’t have stable surfaces to move on. In profile she was exquisite, lean-featured, her skin blue-brown. Her style was what you’d call “Italianate.” I don’t think this was due to Italian genetic influence—a lot of people in the Horn happen to carry such fine-lined features. It’s one of those little ironies of history that the Italians should get a colony called Eritrea in 1889 and see an African echo of their own finest faces staring back at them.

  As I watched her move from the drum to the bunker, I thought at first she was very young, perhaps twenty-two or -three years, and then I wondered if she wasn’t a mature woman.

  Even after she reached the door of the other bunker I didn’t lose sight of her. She stayed in the recessed doorway. I noticed now that she was wearing, as if they were items of Milanese haute couture, the Eritrean plastic sandals, manufactured in a bunker-factory somewhere near here. She hooked her right leg up on the knee of her left and poured a thin thread of water over both foot and sandal. Having rinsed the day’s dust off the right foot, she now washed the left. In posture, in delicacy, the two rinsings were a perfect mirror of each other. I looked at Lady Ashmore-Smith-cum-Julia, but she was talking to Salim Genete and had failed to notice the girl bureaucrat’s almost ritual elegance.

  The woman used the last of the water on her forearms and hands, thrusting the hands out full length, treating them to no more than a narrow, thrifty flute. Rhythmically, she kneaded the moisture between her fingers. Then she put the can down, raised her hands briefly to the sun to dry them, ran the palm and the back of each hand once across the tail of her shawl, unwound her turban, shook out her hair, and disappeared into the bunker.

  Salim was speaking drowsily to Christine Malmédy. “I saw your father two weeks ago in Himbol. He was filming the locusts. A plague, as in the Bible. And as in the Bible brought down upon us by Pharaoh.”

  “For Pharaoh, I suppose,” murmured Henry with an edge of cynicism, “read Mengistu.”

  “Ai-ai-ai,” said Salim, “Mengistu. There is a fleet of planes for spraying plagues of insects, but the enemy will not guarantee that the planes will be safe from fire. He does not want us to be saved from this plague; he does not want us to be saved in any way. But let us not be too concerned about that for the moment. Rest now. We must all rest.”

  In that heat, in the wake of the ablutions of the woman official, I had in fact found Salim’s little recital damn near narcotic.

  “When it is dark,” he continued, as if telling a stor
y to exhausted children, “you will see wonders in the sides of mountains. You have read Peer Gynt? You have heard of the Erle King? This is Peer Gynt in Africa, all this. When we have Asmara, we will remember these bunkers as magic caverns.”

  “Inshallah,” murmured Moka, the toothy veteran, and laughed sweetly amongst his white teeth.

  Something About Fida

  In our room inside, I took out my pack and reread a letter I’d gotten a few months back. It was written in faultless English by a man named Major Paulos Fida, an Ethiopian prisoner of war in the hands of the Eritreans. Stella Harries had befriended him here in Eritrea during her visit and been very impressed by him. Later, at her suggestion, I’d written to him and sent him a few books. He’d felt proudly bound to submit in return a written, mannerly essay, which I now held in my hands.

  Prisoner of War Camp

  She’b

  4th February, 1988

  My dear Mr. Timothy Darcy,

  Thank you for the gift of books you sent me from England. I was particularly fascinated by the copy of the Koran you sent, since I had never acquainted myself with that document before. My mind is attracted by the echoes of the Christian Bible one finds in the Koran. The treatment of the Virgin Mary, for example.

  It is not so much that I believe that Mohammed borrowed from the New Testament. I think he took from the same basic set of myths and fables, the same store from which the New Testament itself grows. For if he had borrowed from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the story would be closer to the ones they told. What in fact one finds is the pattern and the strength of the myth, which is a higher thing than mere detail.

  The fact that Major Fida needed to be introduced to the Koran by an itinerant journalist like me was, according to Stella Harries, an index of the hauteur of the Amhara, among whom Fida had—at least until the day the Eritreans had shattered his plane in the sky—counted himself a proud member. Given that the Coptic Christian Amhara looked east to Red Sea Islam, west to desert Islam, and considered themselves encircled, I wondered why he didn’t bother earlier to inquire into the faith of his Mohammedan co-nationals.

  Major Fida continued:

  The American novels confused me, though it is just as well that I read them. I can see why in my youth at the Harar Academy we were restricted to Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. I had in more recent years read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. There is the same spirit in the Updike, the Styron, and the Bellow books you sent me. I believe it is called a “sense of sin.” Despite how lecherous the books might be, everyone is as cruelly punished in them as in Hawthorne.

  I found a strange, joyless obsession with some sexual acts—distracting reading, I might tell you, for a prisoner of war.

  But a fixation with sin is no different from a fixation with virtue. Sex and purity are equally likely to consume the mind wholly.

  I have to confess that I do not like the idea of the world run by the sort of people who write these books. However, as you know, I don’t desire a world run by the alternative either.

  The novels were instructive, though. I seem to hear reverberations of them in American foreign policy, at least as that is interpreted to me by the BBC shortwave news.

  Someone let slip that you may be coming to Eritrea. I remember my conversations with Miss Stella Harries, and I would be delighted to have one with you, so could you please ask your guide to put a visit to my camp on your schedule.

  Did you hear about what the Chadians did to the Libyans in Wadi Dhum? They captured an entire army corps from Gaddafi. Of course they had logistical help. The Eritreans did the same thing to us a few years back, but it was not reported on the BBC World Service. This most enormous victory since El Alamein did, however, receive some coverage, I believe, on Voice of America. I, of course, heard nothing of it, since I was still flying then for my country.

  I returned to that sentence. “Someone let slip that you might be coming to Eritrea …” I wondered how an Ethiopian major, a prisoner of the Eritreans, knew that.

  There is a rumor again that the Red Cross might succeed in repatriating us all, might indeed be negotiating secretly with my leader, the same one who denies our existence here in Eritrea, denies that we have been captured, denies that our captors spared us, denies that our wounds were treated, denies even that we were brave. I suppose that if the International Committee of the Red Cross did take us home, the Dergue would be too ashamed to massacre us, though we could never expect to have a future in the armed forces. Perhaps I could work as a teacher. In prison I have become more of a scholar.

  In the meantime, here the air is full of the flap of locusts’ wings, and the fear of poor rainfall possesses everyone.

  Yours sincerely,

  Paulos Fida, Major,

  Ethiopian Air Force.

  I was carrying in my pack a letter for Major Fida, given to me by Stella. It was apparently from Fida’s wife in Ethiopia and had reached Stella indirectly, by way of West Germany. It was pretty crass of me, but I found myself daydreaming now and then about the impact of the letter on him.

  Stella had visited Eritrea in the season in which the Eritreans had swung their right flank around the provincial city of Barentu, captured it by dawn one morning, held it for fifty days, and replenished their armory from the large depots lying around the city. Brave Stella was one of the three Europeans to visit Barentu during the time the Eritreans held it, before the Ethiopian air force inevitably drove them out of town with bombing raids.

  It was on the same journey that she had met and talked with Major Fida at the prisoner of war camp in the valley of She’b after dark one night. Stella later played me the tapes of the interview. Later still, of course, these tapes were edited up and played on Radio 4 in Britain.

  She had asked the major whether he had ever used napalm on any of his bombing missions. She said that at the question there had been a flicker behind the major’s broad, handsome eyes, a flicker which said either, I’m telling the truth but this woman won’t believe me, or else, I am not telling the truth and she knows it.

  The interview went thus:

  FIDA: I did not carry napalm on any of my missions. Of course, I was new to the Eritrean front, I had previously been down in the Ogaden.

  HARRIES: Did the Air Force use napalm against the rebellious Somalis in the Ogaden?

  FIDA: My squadron did not use napalm against the Somalis. I had heard rumors of other squadrons …

  HARRIES: During your time flying on this front, the Eritrean front, were you aware that you were doing much damage to the Eritreans?

  FIDA: No. We felt we were hitting nothing but mountain caps and stones. And we wanted to hit more than that. Certainly we knew we were fighting for an imperfect regime. But twenty million Russians perished for an imperfect regime during World War II, and like them we thought we were fighting for the integrity of Ethiopia, for an idea, for the nation’s mysterious wholeness. And within that frame of thought, a fighter bomber pilot brings a lifetime of training with him into the cockpit. A MIG-23 pilot has wonderful technology at hand. The West likes to think of Soviet technology as flawed, imperfect, what you call Mickey Mouse. We, who are supplied by the Soviets, and the Eritreans who have armed themselves by plundering our supplies—we both know that Soviet technology is a capable enough affair.

  Now, to have all the resources of a MIG-23 at one’s command, and to be at war, and to feel that all that force and energy is not being applied—well, it dispirits the pilot. It was a common complaint in our squadron—you heard it daily from all the pilots. Our squadron’s Soviet military adviser was always buying such pilots consolation Melotti beers in the officers’ club. So sharp was this frustration that my fellow pilots confessed that if they saw a flash of green or blue or golden cloth below, they dived at it and strafed by impulse.

  Though not entirely by impulse, of course. We had been told that all the Eritreans were a legitimate target, since all the Eritreans were in revolt and needed convincing. The normal proposi
tions, you see, which are so easy to believe.

  Stella’s Instamatic photograph of Major Fida showed a broad, brown face, limpid brown eyes, the whites tainted to yellow by bile salts released by recent episodes of malaria.

  “After capture,” said Major Fida on the tapes, “once I had had a chance to look around, I was astonished at how much damage we had in fact done.”

  On one of the tapes in Stella’s possession, Major Fida talked with a professional self-absorption about his last mission. He had been engaged with a colleague, someone he called a “wingman,” to bomb a segment of the foothills of the northeast Sahel, the desert littoral of the sub-Sahara which, since the great tank battle at Mersa Teklai, the Eritreans have securely held. He had been told to bomb Eritrean military bunkers on the edge of a barely inhabited Sahel village. Anti-aircraft, heavy in some areas, was here considered to be light.

  The cockpit computer brought Fida exactly to the area. He dropped out of a sky of African purple and came down over the mountains at a height of a few thousand feet. Dropping further, he could see bunkers neatly slotted into the mountain side. There were windows inset in them, their sills plastered and painted the cerulean blue the Eritreans liked to use in their interiors. On the flanks of the hills, a flash of yellow, then a grayer and browner movement caught his eyes, as if the stones themselves were taking flight before his awful descent. This was the first time in his flying career that he had sighted the rebels.

  By his own confession, he was eager to do them damage. The mistrust of Eritrea, he told Stella Harries, had been taken in with his mother’s milk. Compared with Eritrea, the Ogaden was altogether a simpler business. It did not derange the mind the way the very word Eritrea deranges the mind of Amhara, the mind of Ethiopia.