To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  In any case, it was a rare occasion when the Eritreans asked outside people for help, apart, of course, from the obvious mercies of grain and cheese and powdered milk.

  Colonel Tessfaha must therefore have won some argument among the Eritrean military leadership—an argument which took account of and paid reverence to the Eritrean dogma of nonalignment—and on the basis of that successful appeal, been enabled to approach both foreigners, Major Fida and the Western journalist Timothy Darcy.

  On the afternoon of his recruitment, Major Paulos Fida—according to his own taped account to Stella—sat listening to the BBC African news in his bunker in the She’b officers’ camp. On a packing-case table in the middle of the bunker sat his bunker mate’s, Captain Berezhani’s, shortwave radio. Berezhani had been captured together with the radio at the great slaughter of Mersa Teklai, which had left, within the space of little more than twenty-four hours, the bare Red Sea plains of the Sahel strewn with the corpses of four thousand Ethiopian tankmen.

  Fida thought it very civilized of the Eritreans to let Berezhani keep his radio. For they themselves were so short of them. In the mountains they had a workshop where shortwave radios captured from Ethiopian soldiers were repaired and then distributed throughout the Eritrean population. They ran a similar workshop near the first one, where they repaired watches, alarm clocks, and the large Russian wall clocks which ordinary Ethiopian soldiers lugged to the front with them as if such an item, the edges of the face glass often frosted and etched with scenes from Russian winters, were essential for the peasant conscript going into battle.

  In any case the Eritreans, whose officers did not wear any badges of rank themselves or seem to the outsider to assume any privileges, let Berezhani keep his shortwave and his alarm clock because he was a company commander. Both possessions were great supports to him and his fellow prisoner, Major Paulos Fida, who, having ejected from his plane, had brought no possessions with him into captivity.

  Captain Berezhani listened to the daily African news in English with all the pent-up hope of a gambler waiting for an unlikely number to come up. He was almost daily disappointed in his yearning for news of Ethiopian change, for BBC speculation that the Ethiopian prisoners of the Eritreans might be repatriated. For there was rarely a mention.

  Every day the two prisoners, the broadly built Fida and lanky Berezhani, huddled over the ammunition-box table and listened to the calm voice of BBC African news speaking of government clinics shot up by guerrillas in Mozambique, of Zaire’s deplorable economy, of half-reliable rumors of some terminal illness afflicting Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. The stooping intentness of Captain Berezhani, his almost pleading demeanor toward the shortwave radio, were those of a man who had lost faith in military postures.

  It was during such an afternoon broadcast some months ago, well before Darcy’s disappearance and Stella’s investigatory visit—well before, in fact, Tessfaha made his approach to Darcy in London—that the Eritrean intelligence officer called unexpectedly at She’b for Fida. Tessfaha, entering the bunker of the two Ethiopian officers, was already wearing a padded jacket to prepare for the evening chill but, as was again customary among the rebels, he wore no badge of rank. As both Fida and Darcy described him, he had a moustache, a slow smile, and an extremely polite manner. He shook the hands of both Fida and Berezhani that afternoon, for he had debriefed each of them after their capture.

  For a while the three of them discussed the African news of the day, whether Gaddafi of Libya had gone pathological, for example, though of course Berezhani would have preferred to talk of things closer to his own concerns. They discussed the book Major Fida was reading, a volume of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs loaned to him by the political officer in She’b camp.

  Tessfaha all at once told him to bring the book with him. “Where?” asked Fida. “You are going on a journey with me,” said Tessfaha. “Bring your cloak and your blanket and water thermos. We’ll leave at one in the morning.”

  “My friend Captain Berezhani also?” asked Major Fida.

  “You alone,” said Tessfaha.

  Suspecting that Tessfaha might have some novel purpose in mind, though he couldn’t guess what, Fida reminded him that while the rebels were not bound by the Geneva Convention, they had chosen until now to observe it. It was wise policy and would give the Eritreans great moral standing on the day the Ethiopian prisoners were at last repatriated.

  Tessfaha raised his hand in a wry, dismissive way. “Of course, of course,” he said.

  The Eritrean then sat with the two of them during a radio reading of a novel by the English writer Melvyn Bragg. Eritrean soldiers all along the front line would be trying to listen on their unit shortwaves, to figure out the usages and grunt in triumph whenever they heard a word they already knew. An army berserkly devoted to learning foreign languages and mathematics! Perhaps, Fida thought, the Eritreans were winning because there was a lower level of boredom in their front trenches than in the Ethiopian ones.

  After ten minutes Tessfaha looked at his watch, rose with apparent regret, nodded gracefully but without saying anything, not wanting to interrupt their enjoyment of the radio, and loped out of the bunker, allowing himself to lean a little against the dry stone wall of the entryway in what Fida took to be partially faked fatigue.

  In the middle of the night, Colonel Tessfaha woke him in his mother language, Amharic, the tongue of Ethiopia’s dominating tribe. Tessfaha’s Toyota and its driver were waiting outside under a drench of moonlight.

  Once they had climbed aboard, the truck stopped for no one. High officers in the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front army frequently halted on the road to pick up other travelers—private soldiers, village militiamen, nomad women and their children. This was, Fida knew, deliberate policy, a studied denial of Amharic arrogance, of the caste system of the enemy. But this truck was under orders to dash through knots of waving Eritreans who rose from the undergrowth or out of holes in the ground or from behind boulders. Everyone seemed heavily armed with the captured weapons of the Dergue.

  When they have their way and their nationhood, Fida wondered, what would they do with this thirst for weaponry?

  Major Fida spent the night journey studying the alignment of the mountains to one another and sorting out directions. After four o’clock, the morning star rose like a carbuncle. When the light came they kept going, however. They kept going, too, when the light turned brazen. Fida knew what an easy target a vehicle traveling in the open presented to a MIG pilot, but he said nothing.

  After half an hour of such naked travel, the driver veered hectically off the road and into the shade of thorn and oak and eucalyptus trees. He must have been good, an old soldier, a man with his senses arrayed. For an instant later two jets came searching at great speed down the valley. Squinting out from beneath the metal framework of the truck’s window, Fida watched them go with great curiosity. That used to be me, he thought. Watching them circle toward the east, he thought, They’ll be debriefed by lunchtime and have the rest of the day to spend in idleness.

  The two planes banked south and were gone in seconds. Tessfaha tapped the driver’s shoulder. They were to roll out again into the morning.

  For the next hour Major Fida, who did not wish to be hit by cannon fire or cluster bombs from home, found it necessary to match Colonel Tessfaha’s composure. But then he began to detect, through the opened window of the truck, the chemical smell of napalm. (Though he claims never to have dropped napalm himself, he says he once visited a burned-out Somali village where that unmistakable redolence prevailed.)

  From behind a boulder along the road three village militiamen in their white jellabas, dyed jackets, and turbans rose. Behind and above the road stretched a natural platform, terraced, dotted now with burned and uprooted thorn bushes and shade trees. There were seared uprights, too, of what had been brush houses, and a number of unroofed, tumbled, napalm-oily drystone walls.

  The truck braked and one of the militiamen leaned in the
window. He spoke quietly in Tigrean, a language with which since his imprisonment Major Fida had achieved a little familiarity. The name of the village, said the militiaman, was Moshkub. Three MIGs had dropped napalm and fragmentation bombs on it the afternoon before. There had been deaths. The surgeon from the regional hospital at Zara had not arrived until two o’clock that morning. He had been operating ever since in the mosque.

  The militiaman advised them to get the truck under cover. He waited till they had done this, till it was tucked in among oaks and eucalypts. The other two peasant militiamen returned to the cover of the boulders, but as Tessfaha and Fida dismounted, the third man strode off across the middle of the scorched place, leading them. They followed, walking gingerly. The ground seemed full of black shapes into which one did not closely inquire. The earth had been fused to an evil glaze.

  Even beyond, among the trees and brush shelters which had not been burned, boughs had been stripped and lopped and roofs and walls torn away to show the rudiments of the refugee life—a plastic cup or bucket, a crumpled quilt with blood on it. This part of the village was built entirely of boughs and therefore was its own camouflage. The village militiaman led them to the largest of these shelters. From within could be heard the piercing weeping of a child.

  This place, the militiaman explained in Tigrean, was the village mosque, built to hold a hundred worshipers at a time. It lacked a minaret, he told them in his limpid tongue, since that would attract bombers. What had attracted the bombers yesterday was ill fortune. A hygiene class had been in progress in the wadi just below them, and the pilots had seen the women running for shelter in their bright-dyed clothes.

  Today, however, before dawn, all the women and children and the aged had been moved up the mountainside and into caves. In the village there were left only a few members of the assembly, the village militia, the surgeon from Zara, the village barefoot doctor, and her two young health workers, together with those who were too damaged to be moved and the dead, whom he and his colleagues had already buried.

  Tessfaha said to Fida, “Do you wish to look inside?” His tone allowed for the possibility that, of course, Fida would not wish to, and there was no question of forcing him.

  They had to crouch to enter the mosque’s low door. They did not bother to take their shoes off. Neither piety nor the desire for a sterile operating theater seemed relevant. The smell of disinfectant and ether dominated here over the napalm stench from outside. Perhaps it is for that reason, Fida thought, that I was willing to come in.

  By the near wall a surgeon and his assistant, both masked and wearing modern green surgical gear, were operating on the shaven head of a naked girl child of about ten years. Deeper in the shadow of the bush mosque, Fida could see the barefoot doctor in her revolutionary fatigues, a woman in her early thirties, lifting burnt flesh from the back of the complaining child. Two young health workers, neither of them more than twenty, each dressed in the traditional manner, the boy like the militiamen, the girl in unrepentant emerald, held the child down by its unburned shoulders and ankles. On their restraining hands they wore surgical gloves.

  There was a woman, the militiaman told them, whose delivery had been brought on by the bombing. They had helped her up the hillside before the contractions became too bad, and she had given birth on a stone before dawn to a boy. The village militiaman laughed quietly. The mother was probably a kinswoman of his.

  Fida made a frank survey of the mosque. From cleats in the roof supports, surgical drips hung and fed into the arms of half a dozen burned children, into three thin women who, half-naked and part-swaddled in bloody gauze, snored off their anesthetics and their shock. Near the operating table, an aged woman with bandaged chest and shoulders lay, grayly snuffling.

  “This is my aunt,” said the militiaman. She had shell fragments in her chest, he said. “She gave birth to eleven children, but now the surgeon from Zara says she will not live the day.”

  Fida watched Tessfaha walk among the cots but desisted from walking with him. At the far end of the mosque, where in grander structures the pulpit might be, the Eritrean turned and strolled back toward the major.

  The major called on his Amharic pride. The tears which come from shock were close, and he thought that to shed them would be inappropriate both to the damage he saw before him and to his curious status as a traveling p.o.w.

  “I never saw napalm loaded aboard or dropped by any squadron with which I served,” he murmured, so that only Tessfaha could hear.

  “Ai!” said Tessfaha. He raised his hand palm upward, slowly, and gestured toward the interior of the mosque. “You do not think, though, that this is a little of our propaganda, surely, do you?”

  “Of course not,” said the major.

  “We should go and have some tea,” said Tessfaha, not turning to look at the wounded again.

  He led Fida up a defile. The earth grew steep and the village changed from bough shelters to bunkers. A typical flat-roofed, dry stone hut, half dug into the mountain, revealed itself. It could have been the place farther south which he and Captain Berezhani shared. They entered it. The militiaman was already there, his rifle still over his shoulder. He had covered a stone platform with a cloth and placed on it a thermos of sweet tea and a plate of unleavened wheat bread.

  “Breakfast,” sighed Tessfaha.

  Fida wanted no breakfast but ate out of his officer corps pride. These old habits of arrogance, which he did not know he still retained, were handy tools now in this valley of tears and damage.

  After eating, the Eritrean colonel yawned and stretched himself out on the clay platform.

  “Let us take the rest of our sleep, major,” he suggested.

  Perhaps he wanted Fida to say, “But won’t they be back?” As surely as they had seen those two MIGs this morning, anyone who stayed here would see the MIGs return. The surgeon from Zara was, of course, hoping that it would not be today, so that he could move out the less serious cases from the mosque to the caves tonight. Fida shared that hope, too. Tessfaha may have wanted a sign of fear from this pilot who claimed never to have flown with napalm, never to have released it, may have sought a suggestion from Fida that they might find safer places to sleep further up the hillside. But Fida was determined not to offer one.

  In the sweats of early afternoon, Fida woke to the expected scream of MIGs. He rolled straight from a usual dream of Addis off the clay platform on which he was sleeping and onto the ground. Already on his knees, he stopped himself dropping flat to the floor. For across the bunker Tessfaha stood in the doorway, squinting out at the afternoon’s activities. He turned and shouted to Fida. “They’ve sent four this time.” At the end of its great crackling descent, ripping the air as it fell, a fragmentation bomb hit the far hillside. Fida fell on his face, Tessfaha threw himself against the inner wall. There was a jolt, then a vacuum. All the air in the pores of his lungs was sucked forth, returning only just in time to prevent him from choking.

  As the atmosphere grew normal again, Fida heard anti-aircraft fire among the hills. The Eritreans had moved their light flak guns into place overnight, though the Ethiopian briefing officers would not have warned the pilots of this, were not permitted to let the pilots know that such guns had been captured in quantity and deployed by the mere banditti of Eritrea.

  Colonel Tessfaha and Major Fida now seemed in the one instant consumed by the same curiosity. They both rose and ran to the deep-set entrance of the bunker. They stared as the second MIG unleashed a string of cluster bombs at the already burned earth from which yesterday’s victims had been taken. What sort of pilot was this man? Fida wondered. Was he a fool, or was he practicing euthanasia, seeking to end the sufferings of the humanoid shapes he detected among the burned sector? Misreading burned and tumbled uprights as men and women.

  The aircraft banked to avoid the end of the ravine in which Fida and Tessfaha had been sleeping and was struck in one wing by one of the anti-aircraft shells the rebels were firing. The jet began to
pitch upside down. But at the last moment of possible vertical ejection, the pilot pressed his button and flew barely skyward into that same seamless sky which had received Fida months before. Fida was, of course, riveted by the sight of the aviator in his seat tumbling through one of the sky’s lower quadrants, by the blossom of silk, by the seat in descent, the pilot immobile, his hands clasping either elbow rest, sedate beneath his lovely canopy as a Coptic metropolitan on his throne.

  Below him the third plane had now begun its run at a time when the anti-aircraft crews in the hills around had been disordered by their suddon success with the second. Fida turned away from watching the descent of the parachute to see this new attacker land a canister of napalm exactly into the laneway outside the mosque. The outer wave of bursting heat felled Tessfaha and Fida, pitching the Eritrean in a tangle of limbs on top of the Amhara.

  The chemical stench and the shock wave kept them locked together on the floor, and they would both later consider this fortunate, since the fourth plane’s cluster bombs came down just across their narrow ravine. It was largely geology which this bomber had assaulted, but demi-boulders and discs of steel bounced across the ravine, thunking against the dry stone walls of the bunker, clattering on the roof. As Fida and Tessfaha lay clasping their ears, clouds of dust swept in the windows and doors and settled on their shoulders, and vicious little blades of stone whizzed in though the windows, one of them hitting Fida on the buttocks as stingingly as any fragment of shrapnel.

  Then the raid was finished. Into the purely industrial redolence of napalm had crept the odor of human sacrifice, that appalling and obscene savor. Tessfaha and Fida made their way in clouds of dust out into the ravine. Fida was astounded by the uncertainty of purpose in Tessfaha’s movements, as if he were simply another panicky bystander on the edge of the conflagration. There was a black column of smoke from the crashed MIG beyond the end of the defile, and a parallel one from the blazing mosque and its surrounding brush huts. Fida remembers that Tessfaha said, “Ai! We have lost the surgeon from Zara.”