To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  “Well,” said the elderly woman, “you must know that those ELF splinter group people are very active over there in the west. I mean, we were lucky the roads weren’t mined.”

  Everyone in the party—except perhaps Christine Malmédy—knew about the ELF. They had been the first Eritrean movement of resistance. According to their opponents, however, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front—an almost identical name, as if to confuse the outside observer!—they’d been elitist, narrowly Islamic, and had not countenanced rank or power for women. To a European the acronyms ELF and EPLF were simply a series of capital letters for which Africans inexplicably struggled and died in the night. In a savage factional war in the seventies, the ELF had been driven out of their base areas and reduced to a covert existence on the western flanks of Eritrea, near the Sudanese border. The EPLF, by contrast, had gathered the mass of popular support and put the Ethiopians to flight as well. Yet though victorious, the EPLF—whose guests we were—were said to carry uncomfortably the memory of this earlier brotherly mayhem.

  Unhappily, to add to the European impression of feverish and fanatic partisan activity, the remnants of the ELF still attacked EPLF work parties and shot up convoys. Saudi agents and even the CIA were said to hang round Kassala, the Sudanese border oasis and city, encouraging the ELF to attack the EPLF. For it was a matter of surprise, as Stella so often remarked, that no one seemed to want the Eritreans to win. Neither the Americans nor the Saudis, who wished to see Mengistu and the Dergue fall and Ethiopia drop ripely back into their camp, nor the Russians, who were supplying military advice and arms. No one wanted an independent Eritrean republic along that stretch of Red Sea shore.

  Under the prodding of these foreign agents in Kassala on the Sudanese border, anyhow, the Englishwoman’s truck and her gray but remarkably well-ordered hairs had been shot at.

  Henry asked, “You said the Anti-Slavery Society?”

  “Exactly,” said the woman.

  This ancient British organization with its strange-sounding name had been one of the first of all kindly bodies to intrude in Africa’s bitter affairs. Africans might consider it a relic of empire itself, but I had vaguely heard good things about it.

  Christine Malmédy seemed very interested. “Are there slaves in Eritrea?”

  The woman gave a small smile and brushed a strand of lustrous gray hair away from her forehead. “It depends, doesn’t it, how literally you interpret the word. I would say there were slaves everywhere, my dear. They are called women.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Christine solemnly. I remembered that during her two mornings at Stella’s place in Khartoum she had stared down from the living room windows at the masked middle-class women waiting in the garden below to visit the Sudanese doctor who shared the villa with Stella. She had asked hushed questions: “Do the women wear their masks when they are with the doctor?” “When they are grandmothers, can they take the mask off?” She did not make any quick or flippant judgments about the mask—and that was good sense, because she didn’t know enough. But I was sure now, as she said, “Oh, I see,” to this British campaigner, that an image of the women in the garden had come to her.

  Henry groaned. “You’re willing to get shot at, Julia? To wave the feminist banner?”

  He had a power both to win and lose people in the same breath. In the most dazzling of moonlights, I could see the flicker of Julia Ashmore-Smith’s eyebrows. “It is because I am no orthodox feminist that I am here, young man. I have heard wonderful things of Eritrea. How liberated women sit flexing their minds in foxholes and so forth! But I am not as easily impressed as most. I wish to undertake an accurate study, not an impressionistic one. I hope you don’t consider that too fantastical an aim.”

  Henry coughed and held his hands out in front of him. “Hey, look, Julia, friend, be my guest!”

  I began asking her questions about why she’d come in from the west like that, rather than down the Red Sea coast. She shrugged. She didn’t have a lot of patience for such minutiae. She’d been visiting refugee camps in the Sudan, south of the Gezira, she said. Henry joined in the discussion—he’d been running services into a refugee camp in the same region. This seemed to raise his credit a little with the Englishwoman.

  “I thought you were a journalist,” she said, as if in explanation of her earlier terseness.

  “I’m the journalist,” I admitted.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “I had the truck, and it didn’t seem to make sense for me to double back on my tracks and catch a plane in Khartoum.”

  Tecleh and one of the barefoot doctors decided to drive back to a workshop which sat, without our having seen it, camouflaged in the bush three miles back. The paraplegic had no choice but to travel with them. It was better than moving him to the ground on his mattress, the surgical infusion still in his arm, and setting him down on the rocky floor of the valley. Before leaving, Tecleh found a rug in the back of the truck and spread it on the stony valley floor by the side of the road. The Englishwoman’s driver also found a rug and unfolded it beside Tecleh’s.

  “Please,” Tecleh begged us. “You must all lie down.”

  He would not leave until we were at least all sitting on the rugs. Henry sighed in an overacted way, as if to satisfy the driver that we were perfectly comfortable. In the end, as Tecleh reversed and turned our truck, he leaned out of the window and yelled, “Ciao! All lie down and sleep!”

  Before the truck had traveled ten yards, the Englishwoman asked, “What is that thing I see bobbing on the bonnet of the truck?”

  Christine Malmédy sat up, prodding herself with an elbow. “It is a deer, madame,” she said.

  “An impala,” said Henry.

  “Oh well,” said the Englishwoman. “At home I’m a vegetarian, of course. But then when I’m in a place like this, where there’s no protein overload …” She yawned and covered her mouth with her hand. The moonlight drenched all of us. “Were you aware,” she continued in a drowsy voice, “that four-tenths of the world’s grain goes to fatten livestock? That’s the only reason I forgo meat. In protest. I am not sentimental about animals, like most of my compatriots. And I’m certainly not a hippie.”

  “They might have killed you,” Christine Malmédy, genuinely aghast, said suddenly, as if it had just occurred to her. “These ELF.”

  The Englishwoman said, “I am a widow. It is appropriate for widows to take risks.”

  I noticed that her driver, a little distance away from us, rose on his elbow. He was yawning, as she was. He looked around him and reached out for a boulder rendered smooth by thousands of rainy seasons. He dragged the boulder in under the one thickness of blanket. An Eritrean pillow, I thought. He put his head down on the stone and began sleeping rowdily. Very soon I could hear the polite sleep-modulated breathing of the Englishwoman, too. Where had she learned to sleep on stone?

  I don’t think Henry and the girl slept, though, however keen Christine might have been to adopt Eritrean manners. And neither did I.

  Tecleh came back an hour later and woke those who were sleeping with the news that nothing could be done for the Englishwoman’s truck. She would have to travel the rest of the way with us and collect her vehicle on the return journey.

  I began transferring her military-looking pack from the failed truck. By the moonlight, the address on the airline tag was legible: Lady J. Ashmore-Smith, Onslow Gardens, Chelsea, SW3. There was an offhandedness both in the writing and in the lack of a building or flat number. If the airline lost her bag, they could bloody well track her down in that square of old and fashionable buildings in Chelsea.

  As the paraplegic was being readied for the last stretch of the road, and as Tecleh discussed with Henry the new seating arrangements, I turned to her.

  “I notice you have a title. Do you want us to use it?” I can’t say what balance of etiquette and colonial mischief lay in the question. I’d prefer to think etiquette was predominant. I liked the woman, and if she wanted to be called Lady in this mo
onscape, that was all right with me.

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh no,” she said. “It’s totally unearned, you know. For some twenty-five years I was wife and lover to a man who rose to become a District Commissioner in Dongala—you know, in the Sudan. These posts used to bring with them an automatic knighthood on retirement, and that’s what he wanted, poor old Denis.”

  It had been decided that she would take my position in the back, sitting with her legs bridging the floor and the paraplegic. She climbed the step in a way that forbade a helping hand, and turned around to me in the doorway. “These days I use the name cynically—actually, I think many people who carry round honorifics with them do the same. I mean, I use it for travel arrangements and hotel bookings. I’m sad to tell you, it does make a difference. But since you are not an airlines reservation clerk, I want you, Mr. Darcy, to call me Julia.”

  She passed into the inside of the truck and extended her gracious inquiries to the paraplegic on the floor. I slammed the doors and went and joined the others in the crowded front seat.

  In the balance of that night we would suffer a sand bog, and the track tore two tires off the front wheels. In the front seat we would make occasional small kindly adjustments of posture for each other, to allow an extra cubic centimeter of space; I had an idea that Henry was as cooperative as any in these fraternal exercises.

  At some time an Eritrean amputee wearing military fatigues, a cloak, a crutch, and an assault rifle blocked the path and took our names down on a list, inquiring things of Tecleh in a polite, dreamy voice. He shone a torch he held by the crook of his neck onto his book of people’s exits from and entrance onto “the field.” Behind him stood one of the EPLF’s strange fuel stations. Lady Julia seemed particularly warmed by the sight of the place, a great tank of petroleum buried there beneath rubble, and two pumps feeding from it and wearing camouflage jackets with slits for reading the quantity of fuel and its price in Sudanese pounds.

  Here we all got down from the front seat to stroll around and let our sweat evaporate. Two attendants in white cloaks and military fatigues had crawled out of a hole in the ground nearby to fill our tank and arrange the appropriate paperwork. While they worked I watched Christine bend to look in through the slits of the pumps at the Arabic numbers.

  “Do you know if your father filmed this?” I asked her.

  She smile briefly but nonetheless with absolute confidence. “I think he would like this, yes. If he saw it, he would film it.”

  Masihi’s femme particulière, the EPLF, pumping petrol.

  “We must nearly be there,” I promised her on little evidence. But we weren’t. Under a moon bright as delirium, along the rough tiers of handmade Eritrean road, I took flinching looks over the lip of the trail at drops of rubble a thousand feet in depth. We braked to allow the Eritrean aid trucks going to Port Sudan to make the turns—forwarding, backing, edging, playing with the cliff—and the body of the impala kept jolting. The mountains piled up on my mind, all identical.

  The moon set. At the first stain of day across the peaks, Tecleh stopped the truck at no given place I could discern. He stretched, yawned, slapped the wheel. “Ai-ai-ai!” he said. “Okay. We’re here.” I looked over the back to see the remarkable Lady Julia sleeping with a gracefully tilted head, an old woman who would—I was willing to bet—never know dotage or a slack mouth.

  Outside I couldn’t see anything signaling arrival, not even a pump in a flak jacket. I had a sudden conviction, though, of having come to the right place.

  After we’d climbed down and found our luggage, we all shook hands with the soft-voiced paraplegic who said, “Ciao!”

  “We’ll see you again,” I promised him.

  “No,” Tecleh told me brusquely. “You will not see him again. The hospital here is too big.”

  “You are taking that poor dead beast with you?” Lady Ashmore-Smith asked Tecleh in her utterly commanding voice.

  Tecleh couldn’t understand her distaste. “For the sick,” he said, as if accused of dishonesty rather than of having shot lovely flesh dead. “At the hospital.”

  Approaching torchlight wagged at us from the hillside. It proved to be held in the thin hand of an official of perhaps thirty-five years of age, who introduced himself to us as Moka.

  I liked this small fussy man on sight. He made earnest greetings, practiced each of our immeasurably foreign names, touched our shoulders, insisted on carrying things.

  “Oh, my dear girl,” he said in a low, melodic, lullabying voice when he learned that Christine was Masihi’s daughter. “He has gone to the front to make his pictures. There are events at the front just now! Great movements. We shall find him. But first you must sleep and eat!”

  “Will he be long coming back?” Christine asked plaintively.

  “He will come here, or we will send you all along to him. The first step, Miss Christine, we shall send a message to him.”

  I imagined the stunned Masihi, in some observation trench on the Nacfa Front, frowning over the news of the arrival of his lost child.

  As he led us deftly up a ravine, Henry’s duffel on his shoulder, Moka gave out a cruel wheezing noise. I found out later that this noise was an after-effect of a chest wound he had suffered in battle.

  Gentleman Salim

  The “guest house”—just as Stella Harries had already described it to me—stood on the steep slope above the floor of the valley of Orotta. I suppose you could call the structure a semi-bunker. Its back wall was dug into the mountain. A terrace, paved with dry stones and camouflaged with a vine, stood at its front. It was rumored to be protected also by its own medium flak gun and gun crew. We couldn’t see them. They were believed to be entrenched under the brow of the mountain higher up.

  The guest house possessed three bedrooms, among which were distributed six of Eritrea’s rare hospital beds. And in a washhouse by the terrace we took turns to rinse off the sweat of the night journey and to squat over a noisome little porcelain bowl inset in the floor, the only flush toilet in the entire besieged regions of Eritrea. I didn’t expect Henry to betray any sign of distaste, nor perhaps even Lady Ashmore-Smith, since she too had long experience of Africa. But again I was intrigued at the lack of complaint from Christine. The truth is that I would have been consoled by any signal of revulsion she gave—I was so close to giving some myself. But there was no flicker as she came out of the washroom, gleaming with soap and with the bandanna she had worn to combat the stench still frankly knotted around her neck.

  We were awakened at noon and harried by Moka, our skeletal minder, from our beds and to the dining room. The air had taken on the consistency of an element in its own right—a mix of fire and hot mist. Angles of fierce sunlight fell down the pit of clay in which most of the house sat and sliced across the windowsills, which held no glass and at which giant African wasps played.

  The cook placed dishes on the table before us. She had her hair dressed in those long thin strands which Christine Malmédy had so admired in Bufta, the cook in Port Sudan. Moka sat beside Christine. He spoke with that bent overearnestness of his, his legs crossed and ending in army boots which looked immense on his narrow frame, his shoulders jerking for emphasis inside his shirt.

  “There is no news yet of where your father is. He has trained six cameramen, but they are all busy all the time, up and down that front trench on both sides. And they do not only the front. They film the motor pool in Hishkub, and the road building in Upper Senhit and the agriculture at Agrae, and the great food dump at Jani. I might send you to A to meet him, but he might already be in B. Or might already be back in Orotta …”

  Moka looked at the other guests as if a meeting with Masihi was also their chief reason for coming into Eritrea. “You will be very safe. We will keep you safe from the MIGs.”

  The girl gave her normal half-smile of dazed expectation. She began to eat heartily of what was at table—the injera bread with the strangeness of dhurra grain in it, the bowl of scalding lent
ils and peppers, and the goat ribs.

  “I wouldn’t touch that goat, missie,” Henry advised her. “The goat meat does for me, every time!”

  “Don’t be mischievous, Mr. Henry!” said Lady Julia, deliberately selecting a rib and biting into it. “You must be aware that goat meat is the highest delicacy here. A food for weddings, as you know, and for victories!”

  “Well, I’m sad to report that my life’s a little short on weddings and victories. And my stomach knows it.”

  Lady Julia composed the lines of her mouth subtly, and I knew she was genuinely annoyed. “It doesn’t behoove us to ignore the significance of goat meat here, at this table. The Ethiopian army confiscated half Eritrea’s herds, and even when it didn’t, drought killed nearly all the rest. People with sixty goats lost fifty, people with a hundred lost eighty-five. The one we are eating now must have come through the drought of 1985. It may have seen the poor tribes of the Bani Amir wasting away, it may have seen Mensa children die, and young girls of the Saho tribe. And here we are making an ungracious fuss and lavatorial jokes about being fed the ribs of such a goat! The flesh of an animal hero! As if we were being fed leavings!”

  She swallowed and adjusted her chin.

  Henry said in a lazy, small voice, “Feel free to indulge yourself on my share.”

  But it was true that Henry had spent all those years in Ethiopia and must have been aware of the festive meaning of goat meat. His feverish, bad-child table manners had some other meaning than ignorance.

  Moka kept on urging everyone to attack the bowl. Lady Ashmore-Smith and myself set to in a tentative sort of way. Christine chewed the meat calmly, experimentally, again familiarizing herself with a taste from her father’s chosen world. After we’d been eating for some time, or—like Henry—had shown we didn’t wish to touch the meat, Moka himself tucked in, gnawing the bones with an African voracity.

  At this stage of our uneasy meal a tall, portly, Arab-looking man entered the room. He was dressed like an old-fashioned Arabian businessman, in a turban, a painfully clean white shirt and tie, the coat of a gray business suit. Instead of trousers, a swath of white linen was tied around his waist and hung to his calves. You couldn’t have picked him as a rebel except for Eritrean plastic sandals on his feet. His large features were far lighter than the complexions of most Eritreans. Only later did I think about the oddity of his dressing European from neck to waist and Arab for the rest. No other Eritrean I had seen dressed this way, so I wondered if the man was a visitor from Saudi Arabia, a dealer of some kind?