Henry waited on his air mattress, his dusty diary still and above all now at his side. He had the air of a man stripped down to the essentials for a large effort.
“But we have time, Mr. Henry,” Moka confided to him. “We can wait another day.”
“No,” said Henry. “No. To hell with it.”
“But if you are overcome with diarrhea in the middle of the crossing?” Moka asked.
Henry stared at him and would not answer.
I was pleased that Henry declared himself ready to go that evening. After the discussions with our barefoot doctor Genet and the boys, I would have found it difficult to sit contemplating the plunge for another day and night.
At sunset I was too stimulated to eat, even to satisfy the idea Moka seemed to have of the heroic Western appetite. At our rudimentary meal of injera and beans, Masihi ate slowly and functionally, and Christine seemed to imitate that style exactly. Just the same, I didn’t get the impression that this was an infant imitating a grown-up. It was more that, in the company of her father, she’d discovered her own peculiar manners. I remembered how we’d clung together in Himbol under the attack of the locusts. She’d been a child without ideas in that gale of insects. I was still a child without ideas, but she’d changed.
Without any ill will, Henry asked Masihi the question I’d been too evasive to raise.
“Aren’t you anxious this time? I mean, taking your daughter over there?”
Masihi drank his tea with little Eritrean sighs and considered an answer.
“If she were not here,” he said at last, obviously offended, “she would be in New York or someplace, wouldn’t she? With people who don’t know what they’re doing!”
He flashed a brisk smile at his daughter, in case she picked up and was hurt by any apparent callousness in this reply. Far from it, Christine grinned unambiguously back. Masihi seemed very relieved. He began telling us further tales about his strange profession.
“Thank God,” he said, neatly hijacking the topic, bearing it away from the dangerous zone of the paternal and filial, “that I don’t have the sixteen-millimeter camera to carry any more. I’m getting too old for that circus act. I’ve spent a lifetime climbing mountains at night to witness battles taking place in darkness. I say witness rather than film, because you need light to film. One night, five years ago or so, when we were crossing the front, I talked the officer around to waiting for the first light, and I got some footage, ghostly stuff, of our party slipping by the Ethiopian outposts. Not very good technically, but important for the archive. The grandchildren of these people, they should be able to look and say, ‘That’s how our grandparents lived.’ Though I don’t know that grandchildren always do that if the film is technically bad. They look at poorly shot stuff and say, ‘Who are those strange people? They don’t have reality!’ Will there be anyone to say to them, That’s old Roland Malmédy, nicknamed Masihi, and it was the best the poor old man could do at the time.’ That’s the puzzle of being a cameraman. The better the polemics, the worse the footage. The better the footage, the weaker the contact between the filmmaker and his material.”
He drank still more tea, as if storing up moisture. I began to do the same. After all, he’d been there; he was worth imitating.
As if he noticed my intentness, he said, “Anyhow, no one comes to harm beyond the front. The worst I did was get tennis elbow from hauling that brute of a camera. The invention of the portable videocam saved my life. But one thing we’re wise to remember: Beyond the front, there is not always a lot to eat and there is not always a lot to drink.”
“Thank Christ!” said Henry, belching slightly.
By lantern light, we sat through nearly three hours of shelling. It seemed merely prelude to me; it did not worry me. Christine fell asleep and Masihi moved across the bunker toward me with apparent casualness and then dropped at my side.
“You must think I was rude to Henry,” he said.
I denied it, though I did think Masihi had at least sounded defensive.
“Christine has been in a psychiatric hospital. Yes, I know it’s astounding, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? Her baby died and her boyfriend lost interest, so what do girls do in the West? They go into hospitals. They had filled her with drugs and were promising her shock treatment. So she walked out and came to the Sudan! I mean, that’s why she seems a little strange. She walked away from her medication. If she was to get electric shocks, she thought, she might as well come here. Christ! What I mean, Darcy, is that in Asmara and Addis electricity is torture. In Paris it’s a treatment!”
And Christine had had exactly that air, a woman who’d renounced opiates and was relearning the world, including its strangest portions.
“I’m pleased to have an explanation,” I told him.
“Me too,” he said, shrugging.
He left me. We drowsed. Sometimes I saw Christine neatly sleeping in a corner, and sometimes again loud fire would wake me suddenly and I would see the surface of the water in the bomb casings jolting with each concussion. Yet most of the bombardment was pitched over our heads and beyond this front trench. I imagined a hail of shrapnel across that arena of churned dust where the day before the Hallal Front had trounced the Nacfa Front, 2–nil.
Moka wasn’t sleeping. He kept studying his Han Suyin novel—I knew it was about an Asian girl who marries a Westerner and was bittersweet and involved the renunciation of love. It had him in. He was no longer interested simply in improving his English usage—you could see he wanted to get to the denouement before the shelling stopped and we started out.
By nine, the barrage—if that was the name for it—grew more irregular. I began to prepare my tape recorder for the journey. Moka was not distracted from his book, however. Occasionally he would pause to ask a question. For example, “What does Hobson’s choice mean?”
Conversation began again. People stirred. Christine began to ask her father about Issayas, the leader whose representative, Askulu, we had met in She’b.
“Issayas,” said Masihi, “is impossible! They all are! Camera-shy every one. You met Askulu? The one with the baby? She is better. She did a lot of television in the West. But Issayas is terrified that the Muslims of Barka or Danakil will be disaffected if he appears on their communal video screens all the time. ‘Who does he think he is?’ he fears they will ask themselves. A highlander and a Coptic Christian and an intellectual, as he is! He knows that the camera deifies, and he doesn’t want to be deified, the way Mao was. He disapproves of the god Mao. Issayas is a puritan when it comes to film. He believes the camera corrupts everyone, the one behind the viewfinder, the one in focus, the one who watches. Everyone!”
And he laughed broadly. I imagined him trying to persuade the reluctant Issayas into focus on a camouflaged terrace somewhere in the mountains.
Ten minutes later, the young veteran from Danakil, Mohammed, appeared on the steps of our bunker and in his musical voice called us up to the trench.
Making No Shadows
It turned out that I had a false and highly colored idea of the kind of stealth we might need for crossing through the Ethiopian lines. The prosaic feel of it all took me by surprise. We stepped from a sap behind a great knob of rock and strolled out from behind it into the middle ground between the two trench lines. We made no shadows; the moon had not risen and the spur on which the front line ran cast its darkness across us. That aspect, at least, was the way I’d foreseen it in my melodramatic imagining.
I had no idea of the direction we took, but after five minutes I was sure we were near the road I had seen this morning, the one which came down from the Red Sea coast and passed through the Ethiopian lines. I wondered about mines but was greatly comforted by what I could see of the easy gait of our escorts, the familiar way they loped across this steep ground.
“You will hear them talking all around you,” Johanes had told us. But we were not to take any notice of that. And now I did hear them speaking all around, though I could see nothing
—the soldiers of the Dergue speaking in casual or prosaically heightened tones. Very soon we seemed to arrive in the midst of a sort of military bazaar. Trucks passed us and we ignored them. I retained a portion of my breath, not because fear demanded it but rather because a kind of wonderment overcame me. What a cunning transit we were making. We passed within ten paces of men unloading undefined supplies by torchlight from the back of a vehicle. Henry and Christine and I, with our white faces and our barely paramilitary clothing! Yet no one took notice of us. Sometimes there would be a light, momentarily revealed from the doorway of a bunker, and a burst of shortwave radio transmitting ecstatic stringed instruments from Addis. I watched the young veteran ahead of us—the one named Mohammed. I got a glimpse of Ismail, the veteran of the ELF who’d been fighting since the age of fourteen. Genet, the medic, walked at my side; her eyes seemed to be fixed on the ground. None of these people swayed. They kept the roll of their shoulders within a restricted arc. The idea was that a normally careful gait would prevent your enemies from paying attention!
In a clump of trees in front of us, a number of trucks were starting up their engines after sheltering all day from the Eritrean observers high up on their lethal spur. One of the trucks flashed its lights. I watched, believing and unbelieving with equal ease, as Johanes walked up to its cabin. We stood about meekly as he chatted with the driver. Some other trucks gave off flashes of cabin light and snatches of shortwave music and Amharic announcements.
Johanes returned to us.
“This is our truck,” he told us, smiling slowly.
I hadn’t known there would be one.
We crawled into the back—it was a large Ural. I remember how Masihi handed the camera up to his daughter, who was already standing on the truck tray. Definitely two professionals on their way to a shoot, casually transferring their gear. What would her French psychiatrists think of this, the refugee from shock treatment operating without opiates behind the Dergue’s lines?
The truck started up and there was a lot of rowdy gear-changing, nothing subtle or tentative, and then we began to move south, passing other vehicles arriving at the front with military plenty. I saw, in a hiatus between dust, assorted command vehicles full of Ethiopian officers dressed Cuban style in Castro caps, bandannas around their mouths. Music surged forth from their shortwave radios for a second or two. Then our cumulative dust choked it.
In a broad river plain we swung away from the established road, cutting our own swath across the banks of grit and boulders. Soon we’ll be on our own, I told myself, and I can start to breathe again. Yet then we rejoined a line of trucks. My chest began to pain dully. I had lost my calm for some reason. Was there air at the bottom of this Amharic sea? A young, disconsolate Ethiopian soldier indolently waved us through a checkpoint. I heard a small bark of laughter from Masihi, who had been craning his neck over the sides to watch the road ahead. This was a new procedure, he told me later, this ploy of joining in the mêlée. The other times he had crossed the line, he said, there had been a lot more creeping. Whereas this was a bus run. This was pure fish-in-the-water stuff.
Throughout this phase, Henry seemed to lie comatose. His head was propped against his great duffel bag. When I regained my breath, I lay down parallel to him. Christine, I noticed, was deeply asleep, her head jolting. I felt a moment’s parental smugness, seeing her get her rest like this. She would need adequate sleep. And yes, her manner in Khartoum and Port Sudan, her dazed, mute manner, was exactly that of a child who has come out of a profound fever and is relearning the world, studying its mechanisms. But now where will she go, I wondered, if she quarrels with Masihi, if he stops filming—or, these days, videotaping—for half an hour and she begins to look at him merely as a lost middle-aged Frenchman in a desert?
On this question, this late-night, strange-place anxiety, I let the stars numb me. Now and then I was aware that the traffic had diminished all around us. It became obvious that we’d taken to a rough mountain road. The truck pummeled me, but I did not come out of my daze until I felt it slowing. Looking over the edge of the tray, I saw we were surrounded by some twenty men in peasant clothing. All of them carried arms.
“It’s the Ethiopian wheat militia,” Masihi told me. “They serve the Dergue for handouts of wheat.”
Johanes and Moka had stepped down from the truck cabin and seemed to be engaged in jovial talk with these men. Masihi himself vaulted off the back of the truck and joined the conversation. It seemed to be in Arabic. There was laughter. Masihi mimed filming them, and they laughed again and held up preventive hands. It wasn’t hard to get the joke. He must have said something like, What if I make a film of you gentlemen and send it to Mengistu?
Joking over, they waved us goodbye. Later in the night, when the half moon had come up over this beautiful, arid high country, a more strenuous roadblock all at once stood in our way. At first I presumed it was manned by Ethiopians or wheat militia, and it was only after staring over the side for some time that I saw a girl holding an assault rifle and understood that these were soldiers of the EPLF. Under the moonlight they talked loudly and confidently. Their hand gestures weren’t stealthy. They behaved like owners.
Two of them, a girl and a boy, climbed aboard with us. I smelled their somehow pleasant musk of sweat and antique dust.
Before dawn we came with them to a village of standing mud brick houses. There may have been bunkers round about, but this town—unlike Orotta and Jani and Himbol—had an identity above ground as well. Perhaps an Ethiopian would say of a place like this, There you are! Stop resisting and we’ll let you live in the open air.
In the hut we were shown to, a beautiful peasant woman, very young, swathed in emerald and bearing a marriage bangle through her nose, brought us sweet tea. Henry had little to say and seemed sullen. I thought of Lady Julia in Endilal. I would have enjoyed her company here, a few I would have thoughts and I means over the numbingly sweet morning tea. As it was, this Eritrean girl was alien and silent within flamboyant cloth, within her set of peasant modesties, and nothing was said.
Letter Drop
We were there five days. Every morning I expected Colonel Tessfaha, who had gone to such eloquent pains to recruit me, to appear with instructions. He didn’t. There was much tedium. We were asked or perhaps ordered—with the Eritreans you couldn’t always tell the difference—to stay indoors during the day, when reconnaissance planes appeared in the sky. If we weren’t already so, both Henry and I grew dull from the tedium.
In the evenings, however, we were allowed to socialize with the soldiers who had brought us through the lines, and with their more numerous comrades. I presumed that all of them waited in this village, as I did, for Tessfaha’s instructions. They always drank some opaque and bitter sewa in the evenings, but their talk wasn’t simply pub or party talk. They’d quiz Henry and me about every aspect of life, politics, and opinion in the United States and Europe—their interests extended as far as the Australian federal system. There would be pauses while those rebels who understood English translated what we had said into Tigrinyan or Arabic, and further sober questions would arise and need to be answered. We were chastened and stimulated a little by the seriousness with which we were accepted.
Moka came into our hut very early on the fourth day. Henry was still asleep, and the Eritrean sat by the bench on which my air mattress had been spread and murmured for fear of waking him. “The letter you wanted to give to Major Fida. You still have it?”
“Of course,” I said. “Do you think I would have thrown it away?”
He told me to get it. I rooted through my backpack, among dwindling rolls of toilet paper, tubes of suntan lotion, and shirts and underwear reeking of sweat.
“We do not have time for tea,” Moka said apologetically when I produced the letter. (It is an Eritrean axiom that nothing serious can be undertaken without tea.) I had also found the letter Stella had written and wanted passed to Fida, and I added it to the first. There was no need to tell Moka.
“And do you have any books you have finished?” he asked.
I was a little confused by the question, but then understood he was soliciting books for Fida. I had finished a novel called World’s Fair by E. L. Doctorow. It might well fruitfully add to Fida’s bemusement in the face of American culture, politics, and morality.
I wondered if Moka wanted both the book and the letter handed to him at once. That wouldn’t be acceptable to me.
“You can have the book, Moka. But I have to keep his wife’s letter with me and give it to Fida in person.”
He wheezed. “Ai-ai-ai! You can keep them, you can keep them,” he sighed.
I followed him out into the early morning light. Two reconnaissance planes, one in the northeast, another in the southwest, quartered the sky, keeping an eye on the occupied province, the rebel nation.
We walked for five minutes. We passed one guard resting under a tree, who called a lazy greeting to us, and then another positioned under the eaves of a hut. Neither of these men would normally have let me move freely by daylight.
We reached the farthest and most isolated house in the village. Moka paused by the door jamb and began to knock.
“Salaam,” someone called briskly from inside. Beneath the thatched eaves, Moka ushered me through into the interior of the place. A tall and very muscular man in military fatigues, a man not as pared down as most of the Eritreans, was waiting there, standing by a table. I believed that he must have been an intelligence officer, a friend of Tessfaha’s, who would try to get Fida’s letter out of me.
“Mr. Darcy,” he said.
To Asmara Page 27
