To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  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.

  At the sight of the cerulean blue windowsills and the movement on the slopes, he released two general purpose bombs. He was not expecting any riposte from the ground, so he was thinking of climbing a little and going back for a look.

  He had heard that, far on the other side of Eritrea, the Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front had captured the city of Barentu and held it for a time—captured, too, its four batteries of 23-millimeter cannons, suitable for anti-aircraft defense. It had not been suspected that any of these might have been rushed down here, to the far flank on the Red Sea shore.

  But the sky until then so pleasantly vacant all around him was now tarnished with sudden little blue-white clouds. A second after he noticed them, one of his gauges showed a loss of engine power and a falling off in hydraulic pressure. Over his shoulder he saw a banner of flame beneath his wing, and then oil began flooding around his boots. With the one surge of flame he lost two thousand feet. He could hear his wingman screaming to him now over the radio. He pulled his ejection lever. He did it with the unarguable certainty that the Eritreans would torture and execute him when he landed. He didn’t like that all his military skills and his laboriously put together mastery of English were about to vanish, sucked up into the sky. On the way out, his left arm caught the canopy and shattered on both sides of the elbow. Vaulting and then falling through a narrow instant of time, he lost all his consciousness.

  Under blankets and beneath roof logs in a bunker, he awoke without any of the pain which had been with him when he ejected. The plaster on the walls was painted blue, as was the windowsill, and he presumed in his delirium that this was the very place at which he had aimed his bombs. A large-breasted Eritrean woman in battle fatigues, seated on a grenade box, watched him with maternal amusement. He did not lower himself to ask any questions about their intentions.

  As in a blue dusk they carried him down to a wadi where an ambulance was waiting, he said in Amharic, “Why don’t you show your hand? When do I see the bastinado and the water torture?”

  There was only one person among the Eritrean soldiers and stretcher bearers accompanying him who understood Amharic. To most of them it was the language of the oppressor. Yet the Amharic speaker in this case was a very black young man, probably from Barka province in the west, which bordered on the Sudan and—in a land of great nomadic activity—was virtually Nubian. He also had, this Amharic speaker, three diagonal scars on each cheek—a tribal person therefore, and one wondered why he had ever bothered to learn the imperial tongue.

  “Don’t be anxious on the score of torture, sir,” he smiled darkly. “We do not want to satisfy your arrogance. We’ll subject you to something worse than that. We will treat you as if you were a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention. We will insult you with compassion.”

  Stella Harries had interviewed the major only a month or two after his capture, and he seemed already pleased that the Eritreans had not satisfied his worst dreams of torture and assassination. There were by now other matters oppressing his mind. He had discovered that his government had renounced him, had denied that he existed.

  The Ethiopian conscripts and regulars held by what Addis Ababa called “the bandits” had not died in torture, but were instead held in vast prisoner-of-war camps stretched along valleys, loosely guarded by small squads of Eritrean boys and girls who wore—according to a phrase of Stella’s—“the discreet air of victors.”

  These prisoners had been excited at various stages by visits from Red Cross officials. Negotiations for their release were under way. Fiercely held hopes rose and fell in the p.o.w. camps of Eritrea. But in the end the Ethiopian tyrant Mengistu, a soldier himself, who should have understood how captives felt (or so Fida told Stella), had ordered the Red Cross to stop dealing with the rebels, to stop talking about Ethiopian prisoners under pain of being thrown out of Ethiopia itself.

  In the photograph Stella had taken of the major, the man carried in his great, lambent, malaria-yellowed eyes the pain of a man who has been, as a matter of policy, declared a nothing.

  The Splendid Bureaucrat

  I was awakened much later in the afternoon of that first day in Orotta by Henry’s voice advancing in anger toward the door of the bedroom the two of us shared. A series of conciliatory Eritrean murmurs followed it. The door opened and Henry was there, sketch pad and charcoals in his right hand and around his waist his belt, which was also a wallet, made of bright scarlet fabric, the sort of item a mountaineer or skier might use. I could see Moka’s face, too, weaving about with anxiety in the corridor.

  Henry was saying, “Just hear me out. I’m not going to have fucking guns pointed at me, and I’m not going to be nursemaided.”

  Moka tried to conciliate him with gentling movements of the hands.

  “Don’t you think,” Henry asked, “it’s a reasonable enough initiative to want to go up the goddam hill and see the valley from a height? So that’s what I do. And some fucking goatherd comes jabbing at me with a fucking grenade launcher. I come here and get treated like a fucking trespasser!”

  Henry’s voice reached hysteric pitch and I got up, thinking I might have to stop him from hitting Moka.

  He threw his sketch pad and box of charcoals onto the stone floor, dropped the belt-wallet from around his waist, walked to the shuttered window of the room, and jerked the shutters wide. A small hint of coolness played around the windowsill.

  Moka spoke soothingly, almost too quietly to be heard. Mr. Henry must understand that the guard up there beneath the summit of the mountain had been thinking of Mr. Henry’s safety. The belt was a very bright belt, and in such an exposed place a MIG might see it. The guard knew how important it was to get Mr. Henry off the mountaintop quickly. So by waving his rifle he had not been saying, Mr. Henry, you are unwelcome. He had been saying, Mr. Henry, please for your own welfare find cover.

  Henry threw himself on the hard bed. “Another thing, Moka, I don’t want my pack carried by other people. It’s fucking patronizing. I’m tall and I’m strong, and I don’t like seeing my pack toted by some asthmatic runt.” From beneath his pillow, he grabbed his diary, with its photographs and mementoes and cards held within it by elastic bands. He turned to the wall with it, as if it were bedtime reading.

  “With all due respect,” he murmured.

  Moka said, his face stricken, “It is Eritrean politeness, that’s all.”

  I smiled at Moka and made a hand gesture to imply that he shouldn’t be too distressed at Henry’s moods. Perhaps Henry had spent so much time playing the ugly traveler just to test the Eritreans’ solicitude for him and his safety.

  His mouth gaping with concern as it had never gaped under the stress of carrying our baggage up the defile, Moka left. Across the corridor, in the women’s room, I could hear Lady Julia commenting to Christine on the fracas.

  “By all I hear,” I told Henry now, “they’re very competent. What I mean is, their advice on whether someone should be on a mountaintop or not is worth taking.”

  “Why don’t you leave the fucking propaganda to them?” Henry asked.

  “If you’ll forgive my saying so, I don’t think the women and I want you attracting hostile attention. Any more than the soldier up the hill did.”

  “You’re so tight-assed,” said Henry. “You talk as if you’re auditioning for the part of Lady Puke’s butler.”

  I thought we were close to more shouting and even punches. Henry was at that level of unreason, and I felt the centripetal pull of the man’s fear—if that was what it was—or the pull of his distress.

  Surprisingly, silence fell on the room. Henry flopped and turned his back again. But there was no tautness in his shoulders anym
ore.

  “I thought I was just fed up with the turpitude of events,” said Henry. “So I said, Henry boy, you just need a tonic tour, a journey. But you know what? It hasn’t been a tonic. Seeing those goddam brave trucks running through the night, meeting up with the vigilant sentry on the fucking mountaintop … I’ve found all that as melancholy as hell. Because these people are behaving as if nature can be folded back like a carpet. There isn’t anything sadder than people who don’t know the score.”

  “Maybe they know the score but decline to accept it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” groaned Henry. “Goddam depressing semantics. It reminds me of Ethiopia, too. Am I allowed to say that? How much I miss the place? They remind me of the Ethiopians. The same lean, fucking dignity. The same dark questions in the fucking eyes …”

  I could see Moka still hovering in the corridor. He wasn’t certain yet that Henry had subsided. Soon though, Henry was snoring unabashedly, the sort of noise only the very tired make. It seemed to me all at once that it had cost him greatly to get this far, to the threshold of the Eritrean furnace.

  That afternoon, there needed to be a coffee ceremony. Moka seemed wary about inviting Henry. But he could not avoid it. It was a debt of tradition which all the besieged Eritreans of Orotta felt they must pay the visitor.

  At the hour for the ceremony, I found Lady Julia sitting on the terrace with her camera and notebook. Her mouth was tightly held and her eyebrows arched, as if I somehow shared the blame for Henry’s fit.

  I watched Moka lead Henry and the girl out of the bunker–guest house, the three of them moving carefully, as if not to interfere with each other’s magnetic field. Henry climbed down the embankment to the drum full of washing water, scooped out a powdered-milk canful, bent his head, and poured the water over his skull. There was something self-baptismal, apologetic in this action performed in the sight of Moka and Lady Julia. Drenched, he did not shake his hair vigorously, boyishly. He hung his head, staring at the ground for perhaps two minutes.

  “What an absolutely extraordinary man,” Lady Julia told me. “I mean, first of all, Fuck this! and Fuck that! And now he’s going on like a Hindu at the Ganges! Are we supposed to be impressed?”

  Henry stood up at last, his nostrils curved, fixed on the smell of charcoal from the bunker down the defile. Moka, with a straight face, had described this nearby hole in the ground as the office of the Eritrean Department of Information. There, on flat ground by the door, a woman was building a fire for the serious gestures of coffee-making. The sun, falling quickly behind mountains, diminished by the second the risk of bombing and left the valleys full of a radiant lilac light which, of course, reminded me of Fryer River—what it would have been like to travel maritally here, with tough little Bernadette! Despite Mengistu’s air force, she might well have been safer here than where she was now.

  Salim Genete, the expert on British honorifics, was familiar with the ceremony and was no new visitor to Orotta in any case. So instead of joining the party, he borrowed a prayer mat from the Department of Information bunker and spread it on rubble off to one side, not far from a camouflaged tent which housed Tecleh and the other drivers. It was a top-of-the-market prayer mat, fringed, with a compass sewn into its leading edge. Spreading the mat in a northeastern alignment, Salim made his obeisance.

  I surmised that Salim was probably too sophisticated to pray for specific benefits, such as the safe arrival of his son from the areas where the mobile strike forces operated. And being an engineer, he must have been aware of the iron ore lodes in these mountains, and the influence they might have on the prayer mat compass. But this was an appropriate locale, in any case, in which to praise the God for its very existence, its unspeakable splendor—and to eschew all deals.

  The rest of us took seats on stones on the forecourt of the Department of Information bunker. Around a little square metal brazier of charcoal, an Eritrean woman placed the implements for the ceremony on a square of well-washed linen.

  Unlike the soldiers and the bureaucrats, she wore a little jewelry, too. Small, silver, conical bells hung from her hair. Around her neck was a necklace of modest slivers of silver. She had very likely brought these treasures with her when she fled the Ethiopians. Silver waiting on the rise of its mother, Africa’s moon.

  Henry murmured to me, “Those silver tassels! See them? They end in two little balls. They’re phalluses, man.”

  The Eritrean woman placed a square metal brazier full of charcoal on the ground and over it held a pan full of coffee beans. Meanwhile, across on the prayer mat, Salim had joined his large hands so delicately that you got an impression of the layer of air between them. As he bowed his forehead to the earth, a team of EPLF boys and girls, guards and gunners from the hill behind the guest house, included among them perhaps the one who had ordered Henry down from the summit, came skidding along the shaly hillside, crossed the line which held Salim to Mecca, and went on laughing toward their meal of injera and sewa. Some of them were holding hands.

  There had been a time when sexual contact hadn’t been countenanced in the trenches and gun emplacements of Eritrea. No love had been permitted among the rubble. But ardent wars, to quote Stella’s radio feature, create ardent comrades.

  Now Salim opened his hands and touched the lobes of his ears with his thumbs, murmuring, “Allahu Akbar.” Lowering and folding his hands, the left within the right as prescribed for prayer, he began the Fatiha: “Praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds …” The words could barely be heard, were a mutter. Withdrawn and gracious in our sight and Allah’s, he recited his Suras.

  The woman with the phallic necklace picked out of the roasted beans the ones which had not turned black. Using her cupped left hand as a funnel, she poured the remaining beans into a mortar, ground them, poured the grounds into a strange round coffeepot with a conical spout. The grace and the exactness of the movements absorbed everybody’s attention. There was an occasional small flash of Lady Julia’s camera, a minute spark in an immense dusk.

  The woman plugged the mouth of the spout with a wad of sisal, placed the pot on the charcoal brazier, and sat back on her haunches, her eyes guarded, not intruding at all on the conversational liberty of her guests.

  Looking up just then, I saw the Eritrean girl, the bureaucrat I’d noticed washing her feet at the height of the day’s heat. She stood behind the stones we were sitting on and wore a shy half-smile, the smile of someone confident that an invitation to join the party will soon be spoken. “Salaam,” she said to the coffee-making woman, who covered her grinning face with a web of fingers and murmured, “Salaam-at!” Conventional greetings borrowed from the tongue of the Arabs, uttered now by the Christian coffee-maker and the nameless, magnificent bureaucrat.

  Over by the drivers’ tent, Salim had reached the point where the believer looks over his right shoulder and murmurs, “Peace be on you, and the mercy of Allah.” The coffee foamed up through the sisal. The woman took the pot and, continuing to stare at the bureaucrat, poured off a sludge of undrinkable concentrate and then filled small cups for us from the pot. The brew she had made us was sweet and acrid and strong as malt whisky. It had an ancient taste; commerce, bazaars and the dominance of the sun were there.

  In the midst of the pouring, Moka himself noticed the bureaucrat, stood up at once, and greeted her with the full series of Eritrean handshakes and shoulder bumps.

  “Kamilla-hai” he said to her. How are you?

  She replied with almost the same Tigrinyan words. Both emphatically laid the bulb of their right shoulder joint into the other’s shoulder hollow, working their way up through the comparatives and superlatives of how they felt. “Suba,” they both said, one after the other. Good. “Lilai.” Excellent. “Cernai” Superlative.

  Cernai was, I found out, the Tigrinyan word for wheat. In a land blasted by the Sahara’s breath, a land in which the rains grew timid, wheat was as much a superlative as Beluga caviar might be in London.

  “Please,
you must join us,” said Moka, with languid movements of the arm urging the bureaucrat to sit on a nearby stone.

  The woman obeyed him and drew the tail of her turban deftly across her mouth. It fell away at once, though, as she accepted a cup of the bitter, peppered, gingered coffee. “This is Amna,” Moka announced after another cup of coffee had been drunk. “She is from Frankfurt.”

  What African style she would bring to a Frankfurt February. I thought, Yes, a pretty apparatchik! An operator. You wouldn’t expect to find her toting an AK-47 in the front trenches, or operating in heroic squalor beyond the front line. She would be much better suited to some sort of promotional work, perhaps on behalf of her Eritrean sisters, whose destiny was after all a severe one. She’d be the appropriate woman to stimulate the European feminists by detailing the lives Eritrean women lived in their holes in the earth. She was not, I thought, a woman designed for living in a hole herself.

  Charged with acrid coffee, I found it too easy also to imagine her with a German boyfriend. I imagined a trade unionist, say, or a provincial politician, a journalist, or an academic. It was impossible to believe that she wouldn’t attract that sort of attention. I thought academically, abstractly, about the happiness of such a man.

  I had a lot of more licit questions to ask her about her work and her life in West Germany and her reasons for returning to this, “the field.” But I had a more immediate duty—to utter praise for the coffee-maker, for the rebel movement which had assigned her the task of grinding and brewing. I attended to that, and when I turned again, the bureaucrat called Amna was gone.

  Something About Lady Julia

  From the shade outside the guest house, where we drank sickly tea with Moka and Salim Genete, we watched an Ethiopian reconnaissance plane, already a familiar sight to us, wheel above the mountains across the valley. This plane, however, attracted white clouds of shellfire from a dozen or more unseen Eritrean emplacements. Lady Julia tried to photograph this startling sight. While the Ethiopian pilot climbed out of range, Henry and the Englishwoman discussed exposures on the creeper-covered terrace. “Hate to say it, Lady Julia,” Henry called above the noise of flak, “but it won’t show up on normal film. And even with a zoom, you’re not going to be satisfied with the result.”