To Asmara

by Thomas Keneally

  I concluded that, apart or together, Bernadette and Burraptiti must be on the remoter roads somewhere, perhaps in the northwest, traversing some immensity of dust and spinifex grass. Even though Burraptiti had committed car theft, the nursing sister wanted to leave it to the tribal council and the loosely structured Aboriginal bureaucracies in Alice and Darwin to sort out the return of the truck Burraptiti had taken from her.

  As for me, I believed the police might be heavy-handed with a Chinese girl who traveled the country with a Pitjantjara jailbird. Besides, I sensed that Bernadette, whatever she might forgive me, wouldn’t forgive that.

  At the end of six weeks, however, about the time I resigned my job at Fryer River, I decided to bring the police into the search. They thought it very strange I had waited so long, and even suspected me of foul play against my wife and her “lover.” Interviews with Freddie Numati and others reassured them on that point.

  And then they found Bernadette but would not tell me where. She had asked them not to, had implied there’d be violent scenes if I appeared on her doorstep. I could tell by the way they counseled me that it was very likely to be a doorstep she shared with Burraptiti.

  I had good contacts among both tribal people and sundry whites up in the north, in Darwin, where I was somehow sure she was now. Because if she’d been in Alice Springs, I would have known. Alice is not big enough to hide in. But Burraptiti had contacts in Darwin, a group of loyal “brothers.” Although they would have been from different tribes than his, their brotherhood had been fused by experience of the police and of jail.

  I flew to Darwin but had no success tracking her. Then I went back home to Melbourne and began to scratch a living as a freelance journalist, particularly on Aboriginal matters. I had already done pieces for The Times in London and become a sort of tribal correspondent. The British press were very interested in such material: the wash-up of empire, if you like. Some of my old Melbourne friends, less radical and more nationalist than when I’d last seen them, complained that The Times liked to take every opportunity to cast Australia as a junior South Africa. They complained about a British middle-class taste for tales of neocolonial oppression in picturesque surroundings, such as the rich desert Fryer River stood in. I found myself defending my small journalistic output. I thought, “I’m not paid enough, I’m not happy enough, to have to do this!”

  For a while I contemplated a lawsuit to make the police tell me where they’d found her. But from contacts in the Aboriginal Affairs Department and from journalists returning from the north I heard that these days she was sometimes sighted in the streets and shopping malls of Darwin. One journalist reported that she was pregnant. The question was, of course, whether it was my child or Burraptiti’s.

  As soon as I could manage to do so, I took the long flight to Darwin once again. By now, close on a year had passed since Burraptiti and Bernadette had fled Fryer River. If this journey showed any daring, it was of a very measured kind.

  In the bunker in Eritrea in which I recollected it, Darwin seemed more fabulous and strange than the caves of Orotta. You flew to it across absolute desert and discovered it all at once on its low, mangrove-bordered harbor. In its small history it had been destroyed three times by cyclones and once by the Japanese, who bombed it for some months in the 1940s. Its destruction marked their southernmost triumph, a flimsy triumph to match the flimsy town.

  These days the city liked to adopt a suburban air. But the most startling antipodean events could still take place there. Kaditja men, punishers of tribal violations, might pursue a wrongdoer to town and, adapting to modern ways, find plausible methods to punish him, running him down with a vehicle or—in a case of which I had knowledge—tailing him from a hotel to a vacant plot of land and setting the grass ablaze there as he slept. And so the city’s assumptions about itself—that it’s a modern city with suburbs—don’t really convince people. Everyone knows that the forces of ancient law or of ancient air turbulence might carry it away in an instant.

  Her name was not in the telephone book, though there were other Yangs in town, merchants and restaurateurs. I could tell when I called in to the Northern Land Council, staffed by Arnhem Land Aborigines, that they knew where she was living, where she kept house for Burraptiti. One of them, whose cousin had been in jail with Burraptiti, admitted to knowing the address. “But you know there’ll be a fight if you visit them,” he said.

  “I won’t start any fight,” I pledged.

  “Not you. That bloody Burraptiti bloke might.”

  I explained that I wished only to see that she was well looked after, and the Arnhemlander said that he was sure Burraptiti did treat her well, a bloody sight better than he’d treated his black wife down in the desert.

  “Is he drinking a lot?” I asked.

  “He’s the sort of bloke always drinks too much.”

  The Arnhemlander pointed to a poster on the wall of the Land Council office, a photograph of tribal men and women bloated and bleary with liquor. The legend read, “Don’t Let Booze Destroy Our Culture!” Before the European coming, an Iwiaja man like this Arnhemlander and a Pitjantjara like Burraptiti would have been remoter from each other than Venus from Mars. Booze, like the law, had imposed a shared fraternal grief on both the tropic north and the desert.

  Ultimately though, the Arnhemlander relented. He was a compassionate man who could see how badly the business, as he called it, oppressed me. On the promise that I wouldn’t call in the Northern Territory police in their wide brown hats, even if Burraptiti attacked me, the Arnhemlander wrote down the address.

  “I’ll take some wine there.”

  “If it’s for Bernadette,” the man said, “take a bottle. If it’s for that bugger Burraptiti, take a gallon.”

  I drove to a shopping mall, a branch of that true faith of Californian mercantilism you find in every tropic and temperate zone. I wanted to buy her a particular South Australian chardonnay of her liking. It was more than I could afford in this new era of living entirely by my writing. I took it from the liquor store freezer ready for drinking, even though there was a risk that the tropic day outside would turn it tepid too quickly and spoil the taste. I wanted to give it to her ready for the palate. A perfectly chilled memory.

  Walking down the mall’s central aisle, however, I saw Bernadette emerge from a supermarket. She was pushing a stroller in which sat her beautiful but very young child, its eyes Cantonese and, of course, a desert brooding in them. Bernadette saw me, stopped an instant, nodded, smiled indulgently, and then pushed the stroller away. I hobbled after her. Condensation from the chilled wine had wet the paper bag through. It split and the bottle fell, landed and shattered on the floor. People stopped, stared an instant, but then misread the whole event as a small shopping accident and went back to their ruminating movement along the shopping arcades.

  The accident halted Bernadette, too. She turned and slotted her hips between the handles of the stroller. I would later consider it significant that she did not give her baby a sight of me.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, go away, Darcy,” she said.

  “Your color isn’t good,” I said stupidly. But she wouldn’t answer me. “I wanted to know whether you were well, and if he hit you.”

  “I’m happy,” she said, tossing her head. “I have a reasonable life.”

  I thought this an extraordinary phrase. I was fighting a delusion that the cure was only a touch away. I reached a hand out for her wrist.

  “Come back,” I said. “I’m finished with Fryer River. Or it’s finished with me. I know more now.”

  “Please,” she said gently. “Don’t try it.”

  “Would you consider … I mean, I’d look after the baby like my own.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Bernadette, casting her eyes upward. “Do you want a scene?”

  And of course, even at this limit of pleading, I didn’t.

  “Well, do you need any money?” I asked. Of course, if she had said yes, I would have been hard put
to find any.

  “We do very well. The government looks after us. And there are Pitjantjara mineral royalties. He has his share of those.”

  She stared at the glass on the tiled floor. I noticed for the first time the dress she was wearing—floral and not very elegant. It must have come from a secondhand shop or else from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. I wondered if her natty parents, who’d plumbed hills of gold to make a Cantonese princess of her, had ever seen her like this. “You were going to bring me some wine, were you?”

  I shrugged. I began to clean the jagged fragments away with my boot, pushing them under a bench. You see, my gesture meant, I don’t want anyone hurt.

  “It was an ill-fated little present, Darcy. Wasn’t it?”

  I admitted that perhaps it was.

  “So maybe you should piss off!” she told me.

  It was the pungency of that phrase which affronted me. As I blinked, she began to wheel the stroller away again, and I found myself walking helplessly behind her. By one of those circular seats placed around a potted palm for the comfort of shoppers, for the wives of Jabiru uranium miners come to Darwin for a day’s spending, she halted a moment.

  “You know, there are plenty of precedents for the intermarriage of the Chinese and the Arnhemlanders,” she said, very solemn in her explanation, “and so Burraptiti doesn’t feel out of it all up here, even though he’s a desert native. They feel superior to us. So it doesn’t have the same dangers as getting in with a white girl.”

  For an instant, a morbid determination toward self-punishment, the certainty that the ill will of the tribal council had worked, was in her face. I moved up and thrust a piece of paper with my Melbourne telephone number into her hand, and this time she let me.

  “Just as well the wine bottle broke,” Bernadette told me. “We don’t drink vintages, David and I.”

  So something was rich and right between Burraptiti and her. Because it had a conjugal ring, the way she said “David and I.”

  “Listen, Darcy,” she said. “Don’t dare follow me.”

  And I didn’t. I lacked the daring.

  The beautiful child, with the double burden and glory of its races lying coiled in it, clucked a little as she pushed it away and out through the doors. I watched them until they paused in the parking area by a riotously dented and discolored Holden. The body of the car had been scraped back for a new paint job it was unlikely ever to receive. I realized that she had not told me the child’s name.

  I used my visit to Darwin to write a few spiritless articles about the supposed exotic north for The Melbourne Age. Then I returned to the more staid and permanent south.

  I would wait somewhere else than in my hometown for Bernadette’s eventual call. In the meantime I wanted to find a place where my tribal credit had not been withdrawn. I wanted to go—perhaps—to Africa.

  All I did at the campfire that night was stay sober and offer Amna the normal apologies of a man who’d behaved badly. Amna was kind enough to tell me she’d heard on the BBC shortwave African news that a party of Australian Aborigines had been to see Colonel Gaddafi seeking recognition for a sovereign Aboriginal state. I doubted that anyone from Fryer River was with them, but I expressed the normal level of interest in this news, and was grateful the item hadn’t been there for her to tell the night before. Drunk, I might have said something like, “But they’ve got their own sovereignties,” and then, of course, I might have told her about Bernadette and Burraptiti.

  I wonder what she would have made of such a love story. And the idea of daring hung over the night. That’s how I could find Amna and arrest her attention. By a sort of daring. It didn’t have to involve the bombing of prisoners or peasants—for sweet Christ’s sake, no. Hadn’t I held infusion bags and keened against trees in the groves of Jani? But it had to be something of that scale, something galvanizing. And I could not find what it was.

  Quite early in the night then, I was thinking of going back to the hut which was now exclusively mine when Masihi sat beside me. He was wearing sandals and seemed to contemplate his dusty feet by campfire light.

  “Our friend is gone!” he stated.

  I said, “That’s right.”

  I could not tell if he knew anything.

  “I did not like him,” said Masihi. “He had a dangerous bitterness. What was wrong with him, would you say?”

  “It was his woman,” I said at once. “She’s under house arrest in Addis.” I did not give him Tessfaha’s version: that she was dead.

  “That would explain it.” He looked directly at me. “Except … is there any such thing as house arrest in Addis?”

  “I hope so. There’s no doubt Henry loves her.”

  He groaned. I wondered if he had a woman among the ranks of the EPLF. Were they, he and Christine, on the road so that he could get his daughter acclimatized before introducing her to some elegant Eritrean bureaucrat in battle dress? Christine’s Eritrean stepmother!

  I did not even get angry with Henry, except in dreams. I spent all of one fitful night reverting to the same dream. In those parts of the dream when I knew I was dreaming, I thought, this is good, I’ll keep this anger when I wake up. But as soon as I did wake, I felt the accusations draining out of me. By the time I was fully alert, I’d be witlessly thinking, Poor Henry! Or else, Great Henry.

  I remembered the appalled face he’d shown as we stood on the escarpment with our more or less ruly camels and looked down on the flame and blast below us, below Mohammed’s granite mountain.

  It did not seem that Tessfaha considered at any great length abandoning his program with the convoy. At his order, we were moved at midnight by truck to the vicinity of the old Italian railway, the one which filleted Italian Eritrea from Massawa on the Red Sea to Agordat in the west. The rail line was abandoned now—the EPLF had made it unusable to the Ethiopians.

  It was here, as we dismounted, that I became aware that Tessfaha himself was not in our immediate party. “He has many concerns,” Moka told me reprovingly when I mentioned this. I watched Masihi, who seemed so calm about the circumstances and was checking his video gear and issuing instructions to his daughter.

  We crossed the ruined line on foot. By moonlight, I saw that sections of track were bent awry and led off in erratic directions. I didn’t know whether this was due to guerrilla energy or to heat and neglect. Amid the sleepers, small spiky suckers and cacti grew. We walked for the rest of the night on shifting, stony ground. It was so hard and so breathless that I was pleased to be able to straighten occasionally and see that Masihi and Christine were with me, to take comfort in rediscovering them. When Christine stumbled, she would say “Ai-ai-ai!” just like an Eritrean.

  By now I expected to find Amna somewhere in the line, too, though I could not see her.

  When Africa’s enormously large and bright pole star came up over the rim of mountains, we reached a hillside on which sat two low goatherd’s huts. Masihi and Christine and I were told to sleep in one. When I went down the hill to urinate, I kept an eye out, among all the settling and digging in of the rebels, for a glimpse of Moka and Amna. I felt certain she was with the party. And if she needed vitamin injections and physiotherapy to keep her ankles from swelling, how had this cruel hike treated her? Had she fallen out far back along the trail, where she would spend the day in hiding and join us at night?

  Unless, of course, I had more or less collided in the dark with Amna, the state of her ankles couldn’t be any of my business.

  The Malmédy cinematic family and I slept deeply for an hour or two, until the heat of full day woke us. Masihi sat on his bench yawning and groaning and saying what a life this was and questioning his own sanity. His daughter smiled back at him. A mental patient in enviable control.

  I stood up, swigged from my water bottle, and for a while stood at the door, looking out at the hillside. The EPLF were all under cover, sleeping in nests of acacia thorn. In the shade of a scrubby African conifer, however, Amna stood languidly cleaning he
r teeth with a sprig of olive. I wondered if Amna kept a typical obsolescent Western toothbrush in the Eritrean apartment in Frankfurt, or even there sought a supplier of olive twigs.

  From Tessfaha before we left and Johanes before we slept, we had the strictest orders about showing ourselves by day, so even at the risk of waking some of the soldiers who lay strewn in their cloaks around the hillside, I stayed in the doorway and called, “Amna!”

  I could think of nothing else to say to her, but I was frightened that the utterance of a mere name, without any prosaic message attached to it, would alert everyone, that they’d all be nudging each other, or whatever Eritreans do when they’re joking about people like me. If I was to achieve daring though, I couldn’t give a bugger about that!

  “Mr. Darcy,” she called in her inflected manner. “Are you tired?”

  I shook my head. She pointed downhill, and in a V among mountains I saw, palely sketched in haze, a road. She was as good as saying, That’s it. That’s where it will happen. Then she hooked two or three fingers loosely across her lips—this must have been her version of asking for silence. I inspected the road again through the layers of haze. When I turned back to say something to her, or at least to think about composing something to say to her, she had disappeared among the sparse foliage. She must have been living and sleeping and performing her rhythmic toilet rituals in some warren there which I couldn’t see.

  For the rest of our day, watching out from cover, I did not sight her.

  Editor’s Interjection: Fida in Asmara

  We know now that, some thirty miles to the east of the encampment from which Darcy had his attention drawn to the old Italian road, another battalion of Eritrean commandos, the soldiers they called “Mobile Strike Forces,” were in operation on the afternoon and evening of that day. With the Eritrean Tessfaha and the Ethiopian Fida watching from a hillside nearby, they overran a purely military convoy made up of some twenty trucks belonging to the Ethiopian air force. These were bound from the Red Sea port of Massawa to Asmara airport in the mountains.