To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  “The cook is very beautiful,” Christine told me. It seemed that for the first time since she’d arrived in Africa, she was taking serious notice of the African visage, of Bufta’s visage and that of the amputees and cripples. And none of the discomforts of that humid seaport seemed to give her any trouble. She didn’t complain about the heat, the uncertain trickles in the shower room, or the fetor of the cloaca. Correctly and calmly, she guessed that there was worse to come. Obviously she was preparing herself for her meeting with her father.

  Her only confession of discomfort was that she bought too much sweet Malinta cola from the street stall behind the clinic. It was a sort of addiction, this storing up of sugar, even though sugar was—if Stella could be believed—the one luxury the Eritreans made sure they had “in the field.”

  I often went with Christine across the open dusty ground by the salt pans. My excuse was that in this area of town the police sometimes showed their suspicion of foreigners by seizing them for questioning. Rightly or wrongly, I thought I could talk them around, or at least give her some companionship in custody.

  The street stall always closed in the early afternoon. Then, just as the prosthetic works in the garage was opening for its evening fittings, the stall would open again and she would set forth to visit it.

  One afternoon when I was with her on this short journey, she pointed out an Eritrean boy and girl from the clinic. They were on their compulsory afternoon walk, he in his wheelchair and she on crutches, one of her pants legs empty, as if she had yet to be fitted up by the crippled veteran at the garage. She was not, however, the slumped insubstantial girl I’d earlier seen despairing on the stairs.

  The two veterans had paused a moment by the salt pans and were talking, the girl leaning over the head of the young man.

  Again, Christine did not seem to indulge any easy emotions about these cases. Under the awning of the stall, she bought four Malinta bottles from the Arab boy she always dealt with, left two with me, and took the other two across to the engrossed boy and girl. Half-embarrassedly they accepted the drinks, both of them offering her a solemn handshake.

  When she came back I put her own drink into her hands. She applied herself reflectively to sucking the oversweet cola.

  “They are very lucky,” she said.

  “You don’t envy them their wounds, do you?” I asked.

  She said of course not.

  And for the rest of the drink, belching softly on the carbonation, she discussed in what sense the two were fortunate. They were maimed, but she knew the maimed had great honor among the Eritreans. They felt their sacrifice meant something, whereas she knew from films that Vietnam veterans from America did not feel that way, felt their injuries as obscene accidents.

  And thirdly, these two did not have to fight any more.

  Right at the end of the list of blessings, she said with a half-embarrassed authority, “And they have each other for friends.”

  I suppose I date the problems I had with Henry from the night we went into the port with the veteran-manager of the guest house for a meal of sweet-fleshed Red Sea fish on a rundown terrace above the oily port. After dinner, the man walked us through the British-style administration section, among barracks and customs houses in their gardens of dust, past botanic gardens in which grew trees but no grass. He talked to us about Malesh, the whimsical tolerance of imperfection which had stopped the gardens growing, filled the bay with perilous oil slick, made plane timetables a matter of guessing, and rendered the people too tolerant of bad governments.

  “There is no Malesh in the Eritrean soul,” he told us. “We have not fought for a quarter of a century to be happy with Malesh.”

  Suddenly, Christine had taken hold of my hand. It didn’t worry the guest house manager—in Africa the holding of hands is a far less sexual gesture than it probably is in the West. I knew there was no desire there and suspected she was claiming me the way a girl does who shows tenderness to A to frighten B off. But who was B? Henry hadn’t given any sign of pushing himself at Christine.

  “What does this mean?” I couldn’t stop myself asking in a low voice. But the question might have sounded to Henry like a smug rhetorical one, from the man who has been admitted into possession. Christine did not answer it. I thought I saw a strange, angry flicker of Henry’s eyebrows.

  We drank sweet tea at the Red Sea Hotel in an environment of mosquitos, and Henry and the veteran discussed their brushes with that fever. But there was an edge of grim boast to Henry’s voice now.

  The veteran-manager did not seem to notice it. “I get malaria because of my wounds,” he told us, looking up at the old photographs on the walls, snaps of British women, wives of officers, resting in oases between legs of journeys.

  The man wasn’t going to state what those wounds were. When everyone had their scars, it was taken as ungracious to speak about that except in objective terms. For they wanted you to know they had been wounded, but they didn’t want to talk about it in the Western subjective way. So, no reminiscences of shock, of awakening from anesthesia, of what the doctor said, of how it felt!

  Back at the villa afterward, I was hunched on my bed beneath the fans when Henry came in, picked up his packed and aged diary-journal and the sketch pad in which he had been sketching some of the Eritreans in the guest house, and made room for himself to sit on his own bed.

  “Well,” he said confidingly. “We know what the trouble with Mademoiselle Malmédy is now!”

  “Trouble?” I asked him.

  “You know what I mean. How spaced out the kid is!”

  I wondered if his idea of spaced out covered also her grabbing my hand during the promenade through Port Sudan.

  “Seems she’s had an abortion,” he told me. “Last month in Paris.”

  I disliked above all the adolescent lack of finesse in Henry, the way he conveyed the gossip, diminishing himself, diminishing the enthusiastic prosthetic-garage conversationalist and closer of plane hatches that he’d been until now. Just the same, it struck me that here was an explanation for the girl’s fey detachment toward nearly everything but finding her father.

  Next I began to wonder how this information of Henry’s was got? Henry didn’t seem embarrassed to have it. But, after the sweet fish flesh and the tea, and the false signal of Christine clasping my hand, could he have been driven up to the roof to make a frantic try for the girl? And could Christine have then passed on the news of the abortion as a sort of rebuff, a curse on all men?

  Anyhow, I couldn’t stop myself asking, “How do you know?”

  “I went up on the roof to check things out. She and Bufta sleep up there. For the cool, you know. I walked in on Bufta braiding her hair by kerosene lamp, and you’d think I’d walked into a ladies’ room somewhere. Bufta gathered up all her combs and covered her head with a shawl. And the girl wasn’t very friendly. Thees ees the womeen’s sec-shyern, the little mam’selle told me. I told her I hadn’t heard the roof was off-limits and asked her why she was hostile, and she came out with this! She yelled it. Why sherd I want to see murn when becurse of wurn I hev hed an abur-shurn?”

  I didn’t like his mimicry. Nor the way that, having a few seconds before seemed like a high school boy loosely giving away a girl’s secrets, he now shook his head like a middle-aged man who didn’t know if the future should be entrusted to the young.

  “She mightn’t be telling the truth,” I suggested.

  “Sounds credible to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve seen a lot of her. I mean, over at the clinic.”

  Perhaps he thought he was punishing me by describing the girl’s behavior in the Eritrean clinic. She watched videos of British and American educational television programs with the maimed. She didn’t seem to have a Florence Nightingale complex, said Henry. It was the young Eritreans who looked after her, rather than the opposite. They would scoot off in their wheelchairs and fetch glasses of water for her. He’d seen her working with a musical group—the kirir (a sort of banj
o made out of the back of a chair), a thick pipe and a thin pipe both peculiar to the region, and of course the universal instrument of the music of the young, the Japanese keyboard.

  Henry confused me now by becoming suddenly disarming. “She doesn’t seem to want to cry,” he said, “like I do when I go over there. But she likes their company. She’s likeable herself when she’s over there. There’s no womeen’s sec-shyern bullshit from her over there. If you offered to take her legs off tomorrow and put her in a wheelchair beside them, I think she might just go for it.”

  I turned down the light. We lay on our beds. I soon found that Henry wasn’t reconciled to all that had happened tonight.

  “It’s up to her to tell her father, don’t you think? That is, if it’s the truth.”

  “I’m not a barbarian,” Henry told me. “Anyhow,” he asked with a frank contempt, something I hadn’t seen in him before, “were you ever married?”

  To my surprise, I said, “Yes.”

  I was surprised afterward that I told him a little, the simplest version: My wife was living with another man.

  Yet sitting on the patio at the villa the next day, I found myself confiding to my tape recorder, the little inbuilt mike close to my lips, some details about Bernadette.

  In my home city, I believe it’s honest to say, friends of Bernadette and mine still use old-fashioned terms like unlucky and ill-fated as they pass on what they know of us and what’s become of us. One thing that’s become of me is that I won’t be able to be reached in Eritrea. I told Bernadette when I met her the last time that she could always reach me if she chose. There was a side of me which considered this a generous offer. In any case, the promise clearly meant little to her but much to me. And it was valid whenever I was in England, or even in Poland and the Sudan, where the newspaper had at various times sent me. It was valid for Colorado while I was there—there were always friends Bernadette knew how to find who could tell her where I could be found.

  But it wouldn’t be true of Eritrea. Eritrea was anything but contactable by the existing technology. There were ways in which Eritrea was not the present. It was the future in terms of the theories—military and revolutionary—which hung in its fiery air. But there was no telephone system. Even if Bernadette made an unlikely appeal to me, the news wouldn’t reach me there. In a world where our most banal inquiries—“Are you missing me?” “What time is it there?” “Has it been hot?” “Has it been cold?” “Has it been wet?” “Has it been dry?”—whistle around the globe in an instant, people cannot wait months for answers any more.

  At the time I graduated as a lawyer, there was a fashion in the law faculty of my university: advocacy on behalf of the Australian indigenous peoples. That is, on behalf of those native Australian tribes which had been lumped together under the classicist’s name, Aborigines—people who’d occupied Australia from the beginning.

  I’d been averagely enraged to find that there had never been any treaty between the European Australians and the Aboriginal peoples. The tribes had been deprived of their earth without even the benefit of a compact, however flawed. Young law graduates like me might therefore spend their days working for long-established firms of solicitors, conveyancing wealth in cash or kind from one company to another, and then give their spare time free to the Aboriginal Legal Service. Work was a shadow. The two or three hours a night we spent in the airless shopfront offices of the service were the real business of the lawyer.

  My clients in the Legal Service were those who’d fled from Aboriginal reservations to the city. They lacked the profound contact their grandfathers had had with the tribal earth. They bore as well the shame of being the first generation of uninitiated men and women. They had, that is, lost their faith. The elders judged them too vitiated by booze and cars, by rock and television, by the blood of whites. The genial mysteries had not been extended to them. The old men preferred to die with those rites and procedures, that tribal physics, locked up in their brains for good.

  The dispossessed children I dealt with in the Aboriginal Legal Service courted their own deaths. They flayed themselves with the European scorpion, liquor. They hadn’t known it at all for the thousand tribal generations which came before. Now they knew it as closely as their own blood. They were frequently charged with breaking and entering and armed holdup. They were guilty of assault, generally against their own.

  I noticed a young woman with an Asian face and a workaday Australian accent coming and going in the offices of the Legal Service. She had her own office with one word—Bernadette—scrawled in black lettering across its glass door. I would hear her competent no-nonsense voice rising from discussions she held with clients or their young lawyers, who didn’t seem as clever as she was. She dressed in dutifully dowdy social worker gear: handknit black sweaters and patchwork denim coats. But she had a sumptuous air about her.

  As I got to know her I was enchanted by her history—I have a weakness for that. Her great-grandfather had been brought to Australia by a Melbourne Chinese merchant in the nineteenth century—along with thousands of other peasants from Fukien and Canton—as an indentured digger and washer of gold-bearing soil. Bernadette liked to tell of how, as a child, she had been taken by her grandfather to a basalt-covered hill in the Castlemaine gold fields and shown a perfectly dug tunnel, wide enough for two small men standing side by side to walk for a mile and a half beneath the earth. From this sap, the Chinese had plundered the hill of all its lodes.

  Bernadette’s parents were property owners and importers of cloisonné and other Asian wares. Her family, though not European like the Australian majority, had followed the pattern characteristic of new worlds—a laborer great-grandfather; a small merchant grandfather, owner of real estate in Melbourne’s Chinatown; a prosperous father, owner of real estate throughout the general community; a socially concerned, noncommercial next generation—Bernadette in this case—working for small pay in a cause more worthy to her than mere clan aggrandizement.

  We appalled our parents by living together for two years, and then maybe more so by marrying. At the wedding party in my back garden in South Melbourne, the four parents to the union had to share the feast with fourteen habitual housebreakers, seven grievous-bodily-harms, and five multiple-automobile-thefts. The Yang and Darcy parents both looked out at their foreign child-in-law with brave incomprehension.

  At the time of the marriage, I hadn’t yet thought in more than a notional sort of way about giving up my work at the well-known legal firm; about going into remoter Australia; about working exclusively with people who were not so far down the road as the city blacks, with people who were still in large part tribal, who had not been denied access to their own mysteries.

  Tribal councils, particularly in the desert, had advertised for people like Bernadette Yang and me to work as community advisers. There was some debate among our friends about whether this demand had been artificially created—had been suggested by white officials in a way which left the tribal councils no option—or whether the need was objective and obvious to everyone.

  But the bulk of opinion, particularly the forthright Bernadette’s, was that the tribes needed subtle mediators. For in the desert there existed two wildly different systems of law, the tribal and the European; two systems of health; and two species of education. Few people were equipped or willing to make a bridge, and if Bernadette and I thought we might be among that number, maybe it was a very venial sort of self-delusion. It would attract a heavy punishment, just the same.

  Our friends later confessed to being amused by the adroit way Bernadette moved me, more skeptical and congenitally cautious—after all, I had a bank manager’s genes—toward the idea that we were fitted for this cultural liaison work. Over late, after-dinner glasses of wine, at dinners at the Darcy-Yang flat, or in restaurants, she could make it seem like one of the few challenges left to humankind. Not just a work of interpretation between two sullen camps, but the making of a span between two planets. And how I loved
and relished her persuasive force, the mysterious face and the practical voice, the voice Australians had picked up from Cockneys and the harsh-tongued birds of their country and which now emerged from perfect Cantonese lips.

  We were employed in the end by the tribal council at Fryer River, three hundred miles west of Alice Springs, close to the continent’s geographic center of isolation. The tribespeople were members of two large tribal groups: the Pitjantjara and the Pintubi people. The Pintubi were among the last on the continent to have had contact with outsiders. These two sets of related people lived on an immensity of esthetically pleasing but very barren country. They knew how to read it, though, and had come to terms with it millennia past. This traditional earth of theirs, so remote from cities, had been granted to them, freehold title, by the federal government only a few years before Bernadette and I were posted there.

  Bernadette hoped to be particularly useful to the women, who—she knew—had different secrets and mysteries than the men. The women were believed to be the most powerful influence behind the tribal council, even though none of them were members.

  The Yang and Darcy parents faced another shock therefore when they saw their expensively educated children board a jet plane bound for the tribal milieu.

  From the start, I loved the Fryer River country. It took me by surprise. The balance of enthusiasm for my new task and this new locale shifted almost at once away from Bernadette to me. It was here that my old half-serious bar talk about the sisterhood of Africa and Australia seemed to take on visible form. For, whether you knew it or not, you did see Kenya there; you saw the Sudan, you saw the mountains of Ethiopia—or of Eritrea for that matter. Here was a fruitful desert where wild honey dripped from the fronds of the grevillea. Desert oaks, said to grow an inch in a century yet three times as tall as a human, populated the plains. And arcing away from the settlement, to the north and the south, were two great ranges of apparently sterile mountains, brazen at noon, purple at other times, home nonetheless to a million flowerings of desert botany, as also to antique clans of euro, kangaroo, wallaby, and dingo.