To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  With a feverish exactness I saw Bernadette driving the child, in the paintless Holden I had once seen them in, down tropic roads outside the city of Darwin, past the crocodile plantation. The Berrima prison lay down that road. So what did this vision of mine mean, with its reptiles and prisons, car, and mother and child?

  It seemed to me in some strange way, not borne out by the statistics, that the baby’s destiny was more pitiable than that of the malaria sufferer in the blue cloak we’d seen in the area of boulders earlier in the morning.

  By mid-afternoon I was in a level state of sleeplessness and wondered if I, too, had malaria. I felt my brain as a hot wad pressing down on my eyes. Late in the day I was childishly pleased to trail along behind Lady Julia, who was more or less the only one of our party left standing and coherent. She’d tell me what moves to make, I thought. With her as an example, almost connected to her by a filament of need like a child on a restraining strap, I attended the afternoon clinic.

  On the earthen floor of the mud brick infirmary Julia led me to, we found a peasant woman on a litter. Various males of her clan would carry her to the regional hospital at Zara at dusk. “But nothing stays in her stomach,” said the barefoot doctor. “Everything flows. She is a reed.”

  I yearned to be as admirable as Lady Julia, dropping so competently on one knee and speaking to the woman in Arabic. The woman was beyond replies, though, and offered just one birdlike consonant back, a barely palpable, fluting sound. Lady Julia’s hand didn’t stray in the direction of stroking the woman’s brow. She was very functional, very fact-finding. She probably knew that that was the only real compassion available in a place like Jani, beneath Allah’s savage knuckle of granite.

  At dusk we went outside and, for some reason I didn’t have the strength to argue with, knelt on the ground like acolytes beside the barefoot doctor who had seated herself on the clinic’s one folding camp chair. Lady Julia made notes about the ill who presented themselves. The line of forty or fifty patients squatted on the ground—the same kind of people Moka and I had seen earlier: wives with gilt bangles in their nostrils, militiamen nursing their assault rifles, camel owners with wands in their hands, all hunkered down in a gracious, curving line across the grove. From the record the barefoot doctor kept in an open account book on her lap, Lady Julia copied down the names, ages, symptoms, and dosages of each patient. I found myself occasionally and confusedly copying the same figures into my own notebook.

  “Kidija Adam,” I wrote, “thirty-five years, malarial fever with cold, 50 milliliters chloroquine syrup …” Later I would see these details in my notebook and barely remember having put them there. I would have liked to pitch forward and sleep, but I had this idea that the heat condemned me to go on being vertical. And if not the air, the string which connected me to Julia.

  And so, trailing the movements of the unbeatable Englishwoman and copying them, I found myself on the edge of darkness in a natural amphitheater across the river, in a circle of granite crowded with Eritrean men and women. This was some sort of graduation ceremony for the regional school, the event for whose sake Moka had insisted we remain in Jani this evening. We sat among the stones. I remember stray details. There was a speech from a member of the Central Committee, who wore traditional clothing, a white ankle-length gown, a blue jacket, a skullcap. People were called up to receive certificates as barefoot veterinarians, blacksmiths, motor mechanics. Dark-eyed women in vivid cloth and full of a glinting, antique beauty improbably received certificates as village accountants or legal advisers. Their gliding movements were so strange, the lines of their faces so unexpected, that it gave me the delirious sense of being a traveler in the old way, of being an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century trekker, previous to empire, lost profoundly in Africa.

  Lady Julia sat beside me and energetically applauded each graduate. On my other side sat a lean farmer, yet another village militiaman out of the same genetic stable as the looked-for Colonel Tessfaha. The man cradled one of those snub-nosed rifles used for launching grenades. Its blunt barrel rose from the cloth around his shoulder and armpit. I believed myself safe between him and Lady Julia.

  Now it was full dark and a bonfire surged in the middle of the amphitheater. From a four-sided enclosure of cloth, dancers and drummers appeared. I liked the contour of the song they sang. I laughed and clapped without quite knowing why. It had something to do with a small Eritrean child who broke from the audience, somersaulted among the dancers, and returned again to his graduate parents in the fringes of the crowd.

  I was suddenly aware that nature, in Africa as in Fryer River, had its mercies. In some previous flood the river had carried sand up here into this bowl of rock. Beneath my hips its feel was luxurious. I slept. The laughter of Lady Julia and the patriots woke me fully only once, to the confusing sight of a comic scene enacted by two graduates and concerned with the grinding of coffee.

  At the same time I was aware, too, for an instant of Moka, a little distance away, seated beside a perfect, small woman in jeans, a minute bureaucrat, an apparatchik with teeth whiter than the moon.

  I felt at first a pulse of anger and then of pity. This was the woman, I understood at once, for whom Moka was delaying our journey to the cooler mountains, our pursuit of Masihi as well, until just before dawn.

  When I woke properly I was on my side in sand which still kept the day’s warmth. From behind my back I could hear a woman’s voice speaking one of the Eritrean languages with that familiar cadence. It was a rich, full-lipped, sensual sound. For some time I didn’t dare to turn around. All I knew was that close to me an Eritrean woman was in passionate voice.

  After a lot of planning of the movement I was to make, I looked over my shoulder. The little bureaucrat with the dazzling teeth sat by Moka against a log in the now empty oval of stone. They were severely distant from each other. Moka’s gaze was fixed abstractedly across the river, in the direction the Prophet’s horse had fled in the seventh century. Now and then he’d punctuate the flurries of language from the girl with a languid “Ai!”

  As I turned my back again and began to drowse, the little bureaucrat’s Tigrinyan explanations ran strongly in my sleep. They were points of light in a drugged night, a film across the brain. They prevented me from the full-bodied coma of exhausted sleep and they pricked my fairly deprived flesh. Waking regularly, each time I would think that Moka and the little apparatchik must by now be in each other’s arms. Somehow the gravid intonations of the girl demanded it. Yet whenever I gave in to the urge to check, they were still apart. Moka seemed dazed by the rising moon and by the girl’s hypnotic chatter.

  It was still hot and the mosquitoes had come up from the river, the lives and deaths of both emperors and peasants written in their snouts. One day, probably in a suburb where doctors don’t often see the disease, I’d get a sudden fever. It would be the price of lying there uncovered in the sand, listening in on this gorgeous voice.

  The next instant, it seemed, Moka was waking me. I sat up. The veteran’s small vocal companion, who was probably an AK-47—toting veteran herself, was asleep now on the ground, five paces away, lying on a cloak, her head wrapped in a shawl. Moka said, half-embarrassed, “The wife of my friend. He is far away, beyond the lines, near Massawa.”

  “She likes to talk,” I said.

  “Ai!” Moka laughed toothily. “She likes to talk.”

  We left her sleeping. Across the river, under the trees, we could see lights jolting and camels and asses sending up their ancient complaints as bags of American sorghum, Australian rice, and Canadian wheat were strapped to their flanks.

  “Some of those people can still reach home by dawn,” said Moka. “If they start out now.”

  Masihi Surprised

  The road that went up to the high village near the Hallal Front where Masihi, according to rumor, was sleeping had been till two years ago a camel track. Moka said that two captured Russian bulldozers had been thrown into the effort to make space up these bare cli
ffsides so that trucks could pass. Though he showed a certain enthusiasm for the difference his brothers and sisters had made to this cliffside, he seemed wistful to me and may have felt wistful at leaving the perfect little speaker behind.

  The coolness of the high plateau we were grinding up toward at last began to enter the truck. People sighed and smiled at each other wanly.

  But in a defile at the top, Tecleh needed to brake. A series of logs had been thrown across the track. No one spoke as we sat still, the engine stuttering away, wondering what the logs meant. In an instant the road was full of men in white robes and blue jackets, men belted with ammunition and stick grenades and carrying assault rifles in their leisurely grasp. Moka wound down his window, and one of the armed men stuck his head into the vehicle and began explaining himself in that same indolent, hypnotic way that had marked Moka’s small friend far below in Jani.

  Moka seemed happy with the conversation and with the men. They were guarding the front, they said, against occasional sabotage from those old, bypassed Eritrean factions who did business with the Saudis and knew no righteousness. Moonlight fell on the tribal slashes on the faces of these militiamen. Lady Julia dismounted and began to speak to some of them in Arabic. She used a delay in the conversation to fetch the ghost-white Christine down from the front seat and take her off on a little stagger among the rocks and cactus.

  In the first crisp, enormous light we rolled between the unroofed buildings of the promised cool village. Above the higher mountains some ten miles south, amid tattered cloud, the last flashes of a night artillery barrage on the Hallal Front could be seen. Wherever the shells struck down there, great columns of dust rose and walked across the sky.

  The truck slotted itself in under some stunted pines. Moka led us off to yet another Eritrean hut/bunker outside which, into a terrace of beaten earth, the casings of 122-millimeter shells had been hammered mouth first. Their flanged bases, with numerals and Cyrillic script clearly legible on them, provided a seat for the traveler. This ironic use of whatever was thrown at them was absolutely typical of the Eritreans, yet Lady Julia and I had stopped exclaiming about it for fear of setting Henry off.

  We sat down and savored the cool morning air. Christine kept her eyes closed and let the faint breeze rinse her face. No one dared mention Masihi. Moka did not even utter his name as he staggered off to make inquiries, to seek out the barefoot doctor or the official of the Department of Public Administration who might know where the Frenchman was.

  While we waited, pot-bellied and shaven-headed children in dust-laden gowns straggled past us on their way to school in some cave. Their transience was just about palpable—you could taste it on the tongue, in this high, dry country, where a delay in rain or an upgrading of an Ethiopian offensive could cancel them. It was nearly beyond bearing to think of them learning their math in holes in the earth or behind the negligible walls of scrub shelters—7/8 > 3/4, True or False? Training in a pocket of dust for the computer age. This is the goat of Osman changed through their schooling to This is Osman’s goat. Language for a future of commerce with the West, the hard and fast curriculum of the Eritreans! Even the children with the swollen and misshapen skulls, even those who could not credibly expect to see twenty, even those whom one delay of rain or one small enteric fever could be expected to do for, even they were made to sit in class.

  We watched the two village teachers, each with his assault rifle and his belt of grenades, boys of eighteen or twenty, saunter along chattering.

  It was cool, as everyone kept saying again and again.

  Moka returned. He had a berserk grin scarcely under control. He may even have forgotten the divine little chatterer.

  “He is here,” he told us, looked away and smiled. “He is asleep.” He began to laugh. “He cannot escape!”

  I watched Christine stand up. There was no hint of expectation or fear on her face. She settled her body firmly on her feet. Moka led and we all followed across bare ground. It was sown with tarnished machine gun cartridges and with shell craters from the Silent Offensive, which can’t have been too silent.

  I’d only think afterward how curious it was, the way Lady Julia and Henry and myself felt entitled to trail along behind Christine now, to share in the intimacies and the dangers of the reunion.

  Moka led us to a hut, half of which was of wattle panels plastered with mud, the other half of latticework. Since there were no mountainsides here to bury dwellings in, a whole range of alternative, plateau kinds of camouflage existed.

  Through the latticework we saw two figures on the dirt floor, both of them entirely shrouded in those white cloaks which soldiers of the EPLF wore. Around the human shapes lay a number of notebooks neatly fastened up with elastic bands, and what even a layman could tell were video cameras, sound gear, video film cartridges, all zippered up in dusty but fashionable waterproof bags of their own.

  There was a noise of snoring from one of the shapes. For some reason it caused Christine to turn to Lady Julia and smile delightedly.

  Moka whispered, “I know Masihi. He will wish to be awakened.”

  Moka brushed through the burlap door curtain and into the crude verandah-room where the two sheeted figures lay. One of them roused at once, swatting the white cloak away from his face. But it wasn’t Roland Malmédy the cameraman, I could see. It was his Eritrean assistant, a thin boy so exhausted still that his flesh did not seem brown but blue.

  I saw Moka hold a whispered conversation with him and then, instead of waking the second man, creeping back out to us. “It is,” he whispered. “It is Masihi. It is your father, Miss Malmédy.”

  He seemed to acquire a certain authority by this brief visit to Christine. Now he returned to the remaining shrouded shape, bent down, and began jiggling the white cloak round about where the cameraman’s face should have been. Staring unabashedly in through the lattice while the sleeper fought the cloth away from his face, I watched the emerging features. They seemed blurred by tiredness, by the upside-down business of filming a night war by day. The broad face growled. Perhaps still unaware of what it was doing, the body sat up. Its eyes stared without focus at the four European faces gazing in upon it, all of them utter strangers yet all of them seeming to be exercising rights of familiarity.

  Masihi was wearing a brown sweat- and dust-stained shirt. He reached for a swath of orange cloth lying beside him on his blanket and, like a statement and a defence, began to wind it round his head until it was a turban.

  “Ciao, Monsieur Masihi!” sang Moka.

  “Ciao,” muttered Masihi, unreconciled. “What in the hell …?”

  “We have your daughter here,” Moka told him.

  “Daughter?” asked Masihi. The brown eyes opened enormously in the handsome face. His whites, too, were stained with malaria.

  Only later would I reflect on the stunning impact of this particular awakening on Roland Malmédy. In a place like this, how safe—beyond ever having to think about it—he must have felt from the business and the intrusions of family. High on the Hallal Front, in a demi-village marked by the rubbish of war, lost children from another place could be depended on not to materialize.

  The shock of Moka’s announcement made him stand. He wore loose khaki trousers, his feet were bare. The standard pair of scuffed plastic sandals waited for him in the corner. All of us at the lattice expected him to reach for them. We would have reached for our shoes even under the attack of MIGs, because we knew how dangerous the earth of Africa was, how bestrewn with thorns and scalding stones—not a terrain for the unschooled heel.

  Masihi, however, who in the past eleven years had learned to walk on this earth of scorpions, came forward through the open door. “Poupi?” he asked.

  Christine stepped forward, drawn by the pet name and tripping on a stone. “C’est moi,” she said. The word and the voice, barely louder than the breeze, seemed to come direct from old French melodrama.

  “Mama mia!” said Masihi. He considered his daughter with
a crooked, apologetic smile. “It is you.”

  She grinned at the ground. “Oh yes,” she said, and it sounded both a piteous and relentless sentiment.

  “Oh God,” said Masihi, his eyes darting. “Excuse-moi, j’ai besoin de pisser. Ton père légendaire, Poupi, en fait il est comme tout le monde. Un instant!”

  And the man we’d all pined to see disappeared around the edge of the bunker, looking for a crater in which to relieve himself. Christine pursed her lips and stared after him. She did not believe his need was as pressing as that, and neither did I.

  Just the same, we all seemed to realize at once that we were intruding on this remarkable reunion, that we could be the element which was making it ridiculous. We would have liked to have remained there and stared, but we understood that it would have been somehow improper.

  Lady Julia murmured, “I should leave you to it, Christine. Be firm with him …” She walked away toward the hut Moka had pointed out as hers.

  But I was determined not to be led off to the bunker Henry and I were assigned to share. I found myself suddenly declaring, swearing in a mumble that I, too, had a full bladder. I ducked behind the cameraman’s dry stone shack. I wanted to make sure he did not escape or try to evade the girl.

  Up to his knees in a crater, Masihi was pissing reflectively on earth that was all grit, goat droppings, cartridge cases. Hearing me, he looked sharply over his shoulder but showed no recognition. I didn’t speak until he’d finished and had buttoned so slowly that you got the impression that his plea of nature was a mere delaying tactic.

  He turned and nodded at me cursorily in a way which said, What in the hell are you doing here when you have the whole of Eritrea to choose from?