To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  As Askulu and Lady Julia continued to speak of British media figures—the special emissary still occasionally checking on the now sleeping infant—Christine Malmédy leaned back on the clay bench, her eyes half-closed.

  “She should stay here and rest, at least two days,” said Askulu.

  Christine opened her eyes for a moment. “We have to keep going,” she said. “My friends have things of their own they want to attend to.”

  “Masihi is always hard to locate,” said Askulu unnecessarily. “As I am, too. My husband is back in Orotta. His letters can take three weeks to reach me—I am always one step further down or up the road than he thinks.” She chuckled at this idea of conjugal messages chasing her among the mountains.

  Lady Julia moved away from the now somnolent Christine to give the girl’s body more room to subside. Askulu sipped from her tea. She did not drink from the cup in the usual, more audible, full-blooded Eritrean way. Nonetheless she gave the normal gasp of pleasure after each mouthful. Tea was the greatest luxury even members of the Central Committee had.

  “There is so much activity, too,” she murmured. “Especially after our victories near Asmara. I mean, just down there …” She gestured with her thumb toward the bunker’s southerly wall. “… just beyond the Nacfa Front.”

  I remembered these were the successes for which Salim’s niece had perished.

  “We all have to be careful,” she continued. “Our agents tell us there was a panic in the Ethiopian command. Our friend Haile Mariam Mengistu visited the city after the military debacle and summoned his chiefs of staff and his commanders from along the front. I speak of just last week! He accused them of treachery and of being incompetent, and he used profanities, filthy words. All the people on our general staff who knew him when he was an officer, they all say that of him—he has a profane tongue. But one of the generals speaks out, answers him in the same terms! Mengistu orders that the man be taken out at once and shot. Three other officers at the table protest very strongly. They tell Mengistu there have been too many summary executions. They will not stand for summary executions among their own. Mengistu begins to bluster and then walks out of the room. Within a day, two of those generals have been shot, five have been removed from command and stripped of all rank and sent home. We are now facing a very nervous corps of generals and—may I say?—a very nervous Mengistu.”

  She lowered her voice even further, as if she did not want the apparently sleeping Beret to overhear. “It makes us worry about chemical warfare. We know our friend has stocks of the stuff left from the days of the Emperor. American chemicals. What chemicals he has from Russia we do not know. I have a gas mask, but how does one fit a gas mask on an infant?”

  For a while, as we sustained a horrified silence, she considered the ceiling of logs, reading omens in the patterns there.

  It was by Central Committee member Askulu’s fiat that Lady Julia was persuaded to stay in that cool, matriarchal bunker. Even though I had interviews to do and Major Fida to meet, I wanted to stay there, too, in this ambience of straight talk, mother’s milk, baby oil, within the wholesome animal redolence of baby Beret.

  But Moka led us off to our own hut first—a more traditional, conical thatched affair, yet recessed enough into the hillside so that only the bravest bomber pilot could have come low enough to see that it was distinct from its mountain. Henry chose to stay there, watching two emerald lizards, splay-footed like geckos, that ran up and down the mud brick wall and climbed lingeringly over each other’s bodies, barking with a yip sound.

  Moka knew I had my mind on reaching the commandant, whose hut was somewhere in this valley. I don’t think he deliberately delayed me on our way there that morning. By now the sun was high and most of the prisoners sat beneath brush shelters, away from its full glare. The volleyball games were over. Some men, however, played skittles with a small rounded stone and spent shortwave radio batteries.

  When we reached the commandant’s home and office, we found him sitting under a tree—in a pit lined with sandstone seats—conferring with a number of Ethiopian prisoners, some sort of prison committee. The commandant was that same lean Eritrean official we saw everywhere throughout the country, from the same gene pool as Tessfaha. Seeing us, he stood and began to shake hands in the exhaustive manner of the Horn with each of the committee. They trailed away back into the camp, speculating with a mild flicker of the eye, but not too energetically, on what my being there might mean. I can’t have looked much like a repatriation official from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that was above all the man they were waiting for.

  The commandant led us into his bunker. He poured me tea from his pump thermos. That and the flowered injera dish seemed to be the staples of Eritrean kitchenware. The sugar in the tea, instead of livening me up, brought on a sort of blunt exhaustion. Moka explained in Tigrinyan that I wanted to see Major Paulos Fida in the officers’ camp. The man gave an answer—judicious, polite, and firm.

  When he finished, Moka turned to me with a kind of pleading in his eyes. “Major Fida isn’t here. He’s gone away.”

  I asked him if I could be told where Major Fida had gone to. I said that I had a friend, Stella, who was in contact with Fida’s family in Addis.

  Moka passed this on to the commandant, even though I could tell from his face that he already knew what the answer would be. After the commandant had spoken, Moka turned back to me.

  “He doesn’t know where Major Fida is. Major Fida was moved. He doesn’t know where.”

  I began to grow rebellious. They had no right to deny me this meeting with Fida, or to stonewall me if something had happened to him.

  “Is he dead?” I asked. “If he’s dead, his widow is entitled to know. So are his children.”

  There was a discussion between Moka and the commandant. At last Moka said, “Major Fida isn’t dead. His health is good.”

  “Then I can see him,” I argued.

  There was more discussion. “I’m afraid that that is not possible,” Moka conveyed to me at last, pleading, his eyes enormously yellow and desperate in his thinned-down face.

  “Major Fida is one of your most famous prisoners. Some very well-known journalists have interviewed him. You can’t use him as you’ve used him and then just say he’s not on tap any more. You can’t use me either …” I felt the undue weight of the journey I’d made to see Major Fida’s melancholy face. I’d believed that however hard it might be to find Masihi, the reputedly reasonable Eritreans would present me to Fida without argument.

  The commandant kept earnestly explaining things in Tigrinyan. He was being very concessive, and I felt a little sorry for him—he was clearly a man defending received orders.

  The discussion was interrupted by the squealing arrival of a small camouflaged truck outside. I could see through the doorway its canvas-flap sides. It was the sort of vehicle in which Lady Julia had come from the west the night we had first met her. Out of the vehicle stepped yet another rangy Eritrean officer. You could tell him not by any insignia but by his long trousers and his hard-bitten, mid-thirties look. He carried a sketch pad in his hand and, yes, it had to be Henry’s, a guess which was instantly verified, since the officer held the door open and Henry himself got down from the vehicle. His Scandinavian features came through pinkly under his tan. Whatever had happened, we stood to hear a good rant from him.

  From the back of the truck jumped two armed soldiers, very young, with that peculiar unmarred glitter you saw in the eyes of Eritrea’s child-military.

  The officer ushered Henry first down the bunker steps but then pushed ahead to knock soundlessly on the door jamb. He entered, making space for Henry to pass into the middle of the room. The two young soldiers waited outside on the stairs.

  The Henry I now saw had a faint, nauseated smile on his face.

  “You’re not under arrest, are you?” I asked him.

  “Don’t be fucking stupid,” he said tightly.

  The officer
had taken the sketchbook to the commandant. It lay open at a panoramic charcoal which was apparently Henry’s work. A Tigrinyan discussion went on for some time—perhaps no more than twenty seconds, but it seemed too long to me. I began to feel that the Eritreans were turning mean-minded, that the bureaucrats had suddenly developed their occupational disease, the one which raged everywhere else in the world but from which, until today, the highland rebels had seemed free. I watched them now pawing over Henry’s inane sketch as if it had significance.

  “What’s the trouble?” I asked, loudly enough to bring a silence. I’d hoped that by now Henry would have been profaning and—to use the American idiom—kicking ass. But he remained standing with that half-smile of sickly anger and said nothing at all.

  My outcry caused Moka to join the conference at the commandant’s desk. The commandant pointed out certain aspects of the picture to him. I was about to go and join them, a critic on equal terms, when Moka picked the sketchbook out of the commandant’s hands and brought it to me.

  Moka said pleadingly, “It is a very wide drawing. It is very …”

  “Panoramic?” Henry suddenly suggested.

  Moka gave a small affirmative gurgle in his throat. “We don’t let people take photographs from such angles. The Ethiopians wait for such pictures, panoramas, to appear in magazines.”

  Then, without any of his normal apology, he tore the sketch out and gave it back to the commandant. All the while, Henry looked him in the eye but said nothing. I could all at once imagine the three of them—the officer, the commandant, Moka—as functionaries in a future tyrannous state. There was now an increased redolence of high-handed bureaucracy. I was tired enough to resent it, to add it to the denial of access to Major Fida, and so to make an ardent demonstration.

  “I hope you remember,” I told them, “I’ll be writing for The Times. They’ll be only too willing to hear about this sort of bullying.” Indeed they would. It would balance their picture.

  Moka held his hand up as if asking me not to crowd in on him with threats of international chagrin and so on. He spoke briefly to the commandant and then brought the sketch pad back to Henry.

  “You keep it, Moka, you little asshole,” Henry said in his tight, quiet voice.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Henry,” said Moka. But it was without any of that ceremoniousness that normally marked him. When Henry refused to move, Moka slotted the sketch pad in under the American’s arm, where tension and perhaps sweat caused it to stick.

  Then Moka turned to me. “Darcy,” he said familiarly, the old Moka again. “Major Fida is farther south now. Perhaps we will meet him. I cannot make promises about it. But cannot you see from this valley that we do not devour our prisoners?”

  I was unhappy and disenchanted. I had perhaps the proprietary idea that my rebels had let me down. Outside, as we skirted the edge of the valley back toward the bunker of Askulu the politician, tripping on the sharp-edged, burning stones, Henry turned to me. He had on his face the same pained, stiff smile he’d worn inside, a smile like that of someone who has had cosmetic surgery and does not have the flesh left to grin broadly.

  “Listen, Darcy, it isn’t your affair. I can make my own statements to the sons-of-bitches. Understand?”

  “I could understand better if I could also understand what in the bloody hell you’re doing here. All I know is you break all the rules and you’re still not enjoying yourself.”

  “I expected to hang together on this trip and … behold … I’ve come unstuck. The unpredictability of the human beast, what?” He uttered the last sentence in parody of the Englishwoman. “I don’t even have a proper job description. I leave the exactly defined projects to people like Lady Julia. God, what a fierce old tart!”

  I said, “Do you like any of us at all?”

  “I like you fine,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t think your little civil liberties act in there did anyone any good. I mean, these guys are playing for keeps. I respect them for that.”

  “Then why bother breaking their rules?”

  “Why not? I think they’re fucking doomed. You know what I think? They’re brave to the point of folly and they’re clever to the point of being dumb. No one, absolutely no one, from Washington to Moscow, wants them to succeed. No one. If the Americans wanted them to, these hills would bristle with Stinger missiles. God’s even taken the rains away from them, for Christ’s sake. Even he thinks they’re wrong-headed. The sin of pride, Darcy, the sin of being sharp when no one wants them to be. Their presumption, Darcy, that organization can save them. That … that won’t easily be forgiven.”

  I was surprised to find this outburst made me feel very partisan in spite of my recent disappointments, raised the temperature of the debate.

  “The world doesn’t want to lose this Red Sea coast to them, that’s all,” I said. “But the world will bloody well have to. They won’t give up.”

  Henry sounded very calm. “After fifteen years here, I know what will be allowed to happen and what won’t. This whole Eritrean operation smells of what won’t.”

  Moka had caught up with us by now. I didn’t like the sound of his chest—things were pooling there which had no place. Henry and I walked on in silence and in mutual rancor.

  The two of us didn’t speak again until we got back to our hut. We lay on the clay benches. The sun breathed in the window and the joyous emerald lizards yipped and barked from the wall. Moka went down to a field kitchen dug in halfway down the slope. A young EPLF goatherd took his company’s flock up the shaley hillside—I could see him from my bed, how comfortably he moved in his heavy military boots. I could hear Henry gasping for air as he lay on his inflatable mattress. I said idly that outside he’d mentioned “job description.” I said I hadn’t known what he’d meant.

  “Well,” he murmured, “I thought of it as a job description when they first talked to me. I mean, I thought it was serious business. Then I find we’re sharing a truck with that French kid and with a goddam geriatric feminist! I think they could have given us a truck to ourselves.”

  “Us?”

  “Us. Maybe they think the girls will give us protective coloring.”

  I considered this awhile. “You’re saying that we’re going somewhere together? Somewhere more than the normal traps they take aid workers and the occasional journalist to?”

  He said, “Don’t play dumb, Darcy. We’re both going to the big convoy bonfire. You on behalf of what’s loosely called the press, me on behalf of what’s called—with maybe an equal lack of accuracy—the aid organizations!”

  I stared at the thatched ceiling, so studiously made. I’d expected the plans for the ambush would have been made with equal study. I tried not to grimace or show any anger. For as a casual traveling companion, Henry had his charms. I have to admit that one of them was that the more he showed the strain in the way he himself talked and acted, the more he made the rest of us feel better and braver journeyers. Also, both Lady Julia and I were so solemnly taken with the Eritreans that without his irreverence and whimsy we would have become bores.

  But now that I knew he was yoked with me on this mission, I felt more alarmed. Tessfaha should have told me. When I met Tessfaha I’d complain savagely, etc., etc. I spent some seconds making myself promises of that nature.

  Henry said, in an imitation of my accent, “You sound abso-bloody-lutely delighted about it, cobber.”

  I asked him who had invited him—I wondered if it was Tessfaha. But it was some of their aid people! Maybe Tessfaha had decided to let them into the plan, too, to achieve maximum coverage. Even so, I could not feel happy about this expedition, which had now been reconstituted in purpose and scope and more or less in front of my eyes.

  “You may not believe it, Darcy,” Henry told me, “but I’m very popular in the Gezira. I behave myself and I run down the Ethiopian bastards with a passion you can cut with a knife. I would joyfully, Darcy, I swear joyfully, eat the bastards’ livers.”

  It didn’t
sound too promising.

  “These aid people?” I asked. “Did they give you my name as well?”

  “They mentioned there might be others. When I found out you were a journalist, I presumed from the start you were the other party to the excursion. I could tell Lady Julia wasn’t. It wasn’t what you’d call her primary area of interest!”

  I took thought. I wanted to find an Eritrean official and harangue him. Across the hut, Henry fell asleep—I could tell by his breathing. In that solid heat, I was not so fortunate. The lizards on the wall yipped and caressed and celebrated their luminous green pigmentation. I felt solitary and neglected at the bottom of Africa’s pit of isolation. Even in the worst of countries, in Poland say, I could attempt to call Stella or one of my London friends, even one of the Melbourne people, the old friends who thought that because of what happened with Bernadette I was something of a joke. Even in Mogadishu or Khartoum I could at least cheer myself up with the attempt to telephone companions in far places. Among the Eritreans, however, that glib therapy was not available.

  Editor’s Interjection: Recruiting Fida

  We are forced to interrupt Darcy’s account to explain Fida’s absence from She’b. There is a need, too, to clarify the arrangement achieved between Colonel Tessfaha, the Eritrean intelligence officer, and Major Fida, prisoner of war and ejected MIG pilot, and to see how Fida became involved in a course parallel to the one Darcy committed himself to.

  Tessfaha’s approach to both men was a little out of character for the Eritreans. In their quarter of a century or more of war against the Ethiopians, these rebels had never begged much of foreign powers. At one stage they were believed to have approached the Americans and indicated that as a people subject to bombing they would appreciate Stinger ground-to-air missiles. But if so, the Americans didn’t oblige. Nor would the EPLF have shown much surprise at America’s rebuff. Perhaps they were not willing to give enough in return.