To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  At last I risked looking full-on at one of the victims, a girl of perhaps thirteen, bare-headed and naked except for bandages which ran tinted with blood or disinfectant from her ribcage to her hips. Her face seemed empty—she had withdrawn from it. She was waiting somewhere within herself, exactly as Salim Genete’s niece had on the terrace at Orotta.

  At the sight of her, a gush of the tea I had drunk up on the plateau an hour or so before ran out over my lips. I looked around, obscurely ashamed, to see if anyone had noticed. Lady Julia was staring at me levelly.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, spitting. “I can’t get used to this.”

  “People are permitted not to be used to it,” Julia told me.

  Some of the head wounds Jani’s barefoot doctor wisely did not dare to touch. She was waiting for a surgeon to arrive from Zara.

  In the meantime, everyone, I noticed, the wounded and the attendants, seemed to suffer from a strange pallor.

  “Why is everyone so white?” Lady Julia asked me sotto voce. She believed some chemical agent had been dropped. But I pointed out to her that even the river oaks and the thorn bushes had taken on a white complexion.

  Masihi, bustling past with Christine and his assistant, explained the phenomenon: A fragmentation bomb had hit the powdered-milk dump, over beyond the sorghum. An Etna of powder had been thrown into the air, had been sieved up through the branches of the trees. The gift of the EEC had blanched all the shocked and upturned faces and had come down even on the wounded.

  Now and then, I matter-of-factly embraced this tree or that; I muttered primitively against the trunks of river oaks. Lady Julia, a genuine veteran, did not seem to be as troubled now that she was here at the site. She knew the way of the world better.

  At some stage we all ended holding up surgical drips, me over a young farmer who told me his name was Mohammed Mohammed, the same name as the health worker who had been dosing Henry’s headache on the plateau above us.

  Throughout the night, as we took an occasional rest on a blanket or drank some sweet tea, Moka and Masihi returned to the aspect everyone unscarred seemed to be discussing. “They were accurate,” Masihi said. He meant the bombers. “More accurate than normally. The casualty list is very high.”

  Toward dawn, while Lady Julia and I rested against the trunks of river oaks, a young surgeon and three nurses turned up from Zara with a portable operating theater. The dead had already been buried. To mark the arrival of the surgeon with his old-fashioned anesthetics—he lacked compressed oxygen and respirators—the mourning under Jani’s white, blasted trees fell off to an occasional shrill, an intermittent yell of maternal incomprehension among the oaks by the river.

  Julia in Endilal

  It was late in the afternoon that I said goodbye to Masihi and the girl. This was on the banks of Jani’s river, in the awful torpid air. She and her father, both of them hollow-eyed, were sitting on the back tray of their truck, sharing water from the canteen Christine and I had bought together in the market in Khartoum. They would stay here one more day, Masihi said. Perhaps there would be another raid. Of course, of course they would be all right if that happened. He was a veteran in these matters! Anyhow, it was unlikely, since more anti-aircraft guns were being moved in, and the Ethiopians weren’t in the economic position to throw planes and pilots away.

  So then Masihi and his daughter would run their footage back to Orotta for editing, before replenishing their film stock and taking to the road again.

  Christine and I made hurried goodbyes while Julia was speaking to Masihi.

  “You have been very kind, Darcy,” she told me formally.

  “Not at all,” I said hollowly. But in spite of myself, I felt under-rewarded by this farewell. “So, you’re happy now?”

  She gestured over her shoulder at the jumble of equipment in the truck. “I am very busy, anyhow.”

  But again there was the stupid sense of being owed more.

  “What is it, Christine? Why do you seem dazed?”

  “Dazed?” she asked. But she didn’t try to define what I meant.

  I was already regretting my rashness but I was, of course, committed now.

  “Something started you off on the road. Something happened. Anyone can tell that.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like it. This drove me to the greatest, the crassest mistake.

  “Henry says you mentioned an abortion.”

  Her face went red and she dropped her head. “Please, Darcy,” she said. “I told him that to send him away.”

  I could see Masihi frowning at me over Lady Julia’s shoulder and was at once repentant.

  “Forgive me,” I murmured. “You’ll tell me one day.”

  “Yes,” she said, not lifting her eyes to mine.

  The group farewells were hearty, lots of laughter and gruffness from Masihi and me. Yet it was all melancholy to me. I was aware that we would soon lose Lady Julia, too, and then it would be simply Henry and I on our own with Moka. I did not know if Henry and I between us had enough composure to go around.

  So Moka and Julia and I fetched the concussed Henry from the plateau and traveled all night again, parallel to the front line, to a high village called Endilal far to the east, behind the Nacfa Front. I was still dazed from the flour-white horrors of Jani when we arrived there, and trailed behind Lady Julia like a bewildered nephew just as I had in Jani.

  Endilal, revealed by daylight, stood close to the sun, was high and dry and plagued by wind. Julia, quit of her responsibility for the girl, was looking very tired, as you would have thought a woman of her age had a right to be. But one look at a place like Endilal told you it was the perfect village for the sorts of questions Lady Julia wanted answered: for matters to do with the health and well-being of peasant wives.

  Some time during that coming night, Moka said, Henry and I were to go on to the Nacfa Front. We’d spent the afternoon with Julia, and she and Henry very nearly got on together now that they were assured of a parting. We sat together in a hut of logs chatting, by way of Moka’s Tigrinyan and Julia’s Arabic, with four of the local women and a man who appeared to be an out-of-work farmer. Most of his goats had died of thirst and hunger in ’85, and some livestock disease accounted for the remaining fifteen a year later. He was therefore Job, but whimsical about it. He waved his hands and his eyes sparkled darkly. He was ready for any catastrophe, trimmed down for it—it was obvious by his bearing. Death was a mean joke, but a day of injera and adequate water and no bombing seemed cause for euphoria or even hilarity.

  One of the women, the most forthright one, shared the same name as that bureaucrat cousin of Salim’s. I wondered how long past it was since the women of the clan of Salim’s Amna, of Amna Nurhussein, had dressed and looked like this Amna, had carried in their faces both the painful coyness and the earthiness of the peasant, the pastoral nomad.

  This Amna was the elected birth attendant in Endilal, and I could imagine women in labor getting some comfort from her businesslike way of speaking and moving.

  All the women wore the golden bangle of marriage in their nostrils—even the one who did not know where her husband was. Masihi had told me that when the Ethiopian army massacred Eritreans, the soldiers walked among the fallen plucking these nose bands as if they were gathering fruit.

  Coughing from the day’s dust, Henry and I ate a quiet meal with Moka—injera and the ground-up chickpeas called shiru. The dust sounded heavy on Moka’s chest. This place used to be heavily treed, only seventy years past, the engineer had told us earlier in the day. But peasants had cut the trees for firewood, and now the MIGs made the planting of new ones impossible. He’d shrugged, smiling. “Dead peasants and live bombs! They made this desolation.”

  Lady Julia had already moved into the clinic with the barefoot doctor. That’s where she would spend her time and conduct her inquiries. Early in the night she came from the clinic to ask me to join her over there for a farewell drink. She did not ask Henry, who in any case was alread
y cold and tired enough to be in his sleeping bag thumbing through his diary, looking at photographs of his days in Addis and rearranging the elastic bands around the mass of his memories.

  As we walked together among the desolate black hills, I thought Lady Julia restrained. I knew she’d sat through that afternoon’s clinic hour, and I wondered if she’d found that depressing. But when I mentioned the clinic, she brightened.

  “Nothing conclusive,” she told me. “Only indications. But—on top of what we saw in the great hospital in Orotta—the indications are astounding. As I said then, Darcy, the chance of a great shift in history! No less, I assure you. No less.”

  She led me down into the bunker of the barefoot doctor, whose name was Ferreweine, a chunky woman of about thirty-eight, dressed in the usual military fatigues. Ferreweine had a bucket of sewa, which she covered with a cloth to prevent it going off. She filled three plastic mugs with the opaque liquor, and we sat around the ammunition-box table. Lady Julia performed her usual trick, telling me things in English, then breaking off to tell Ferreweine in Arabic what she had told me; and Ferreweine would smile but make adjusting gestures with her hand, as if in a way she wanted to tone Lady Julia down.

  As Lady Julia spoke I, too, found myself giving room to the possibility that the world might in fact be more habitable than it had seemed to be since Jani. Perhaps this shift was made more possible by the sewa, by drinking it with two wise women. In any case, I let myself all at once experience an excitement parallel to Julia’s, a normal enthusiasm of the type I’d been keeping in check since my foolish upbraiding of trees after the Jani bombing.

  But there was still an ambiguous, overbright sparkle in Lady Julia’s eyes. The exaltation seemed to be fighting its way out of her through a thin but obvious skin of loss, of ice-calm grief.

  “I wish my late husband, Denis,” she cried out, “was here to see this with me. What an education! Even more perhaps for my Aunt Chloe. Aunt Chloe would understand the significance, where poor dear Denis might need it explained to him.”

  I wondered about her choice of words. An education for Aunt Chloe? Yet Chloe was a martyr and therefore needed no education.

  “I must tell you, Darcy,” said Julia, “that I’ve never been anywhere in the African world where I’ve felt so sharply the hope that millennia of foul practice have been reversed. But by the people themselves! You see, old Denis had something when he said, ‘We can’t push things too hard, Julie. The whole business is just part of the fabric of things!’ Now curiously, Ferreweine keeps on saying the same thing. But it’s obvious to me. They are defeating it here. And in a way that I could never defeat it in Sudan! Oh, there was nothing wrong with Aunt Chloe and me. We just weren’t Africans, that’s all.”

  I saw tears spill down her cheeks. They lasted so briefly that I don’t think chunky Ferreweine saw them. Julia dashed them aside and began again on some solid quaffing. “This positive demon of male clitoris envy!” she announced. “Do we ever encounter a reference to it among the psychoanalysts? I should say not! Yet there it is, present in our own society. Why, even in this very century doctors have used it as a treatment for hysteria! But who confronts it, this monster with the knife in its hand long before the Christian era and the coming of Islam? A stone knife before there was a steel one.”

  “Imagine, if you will,” Lady Julia invited me after we’d drunk yet more of Ferreweine’s hard, acrid brew, “a heavily treed Eden—an Eden such as Endilal once was. There Adam looks upon the being of perfection and hears—even in the first embrace—the unsettling cries of her desire. And so he takes to her with a knife. Because he fears the whole world will be unbalanced by her honest sensuality. And there, in that first touch, is the root cause of all this savagery, Darcy! The first caress was a caress of the hand. The second was of the knife!”

  I began shivering, perhaps from the drink. I suffered a sensation, this no doubt from Ferreweine’s harsh liquor, that there was some sort of alliance of thought and grief between Bernadette and Julia. This was déjà vu of the sharpest kind, and my shivering grew to a ridiculous extent. I feared Ferreweine might try to diagnose me. I was aware of my face flushing and sweat all over my brow and under my eyes.

  In the high, barren village called Endilal, Lady Julia explained, she’d expected the barbarity to be at its worst—hard times, a population of refugees from the south, conservative and frightened people who might, as the whole world turned to fire and grit, fall back on old practices as a means of balancing out the cosmos.

  But that night, she said, some forty people—three quarters of them women and children—had been presented at Ferreweine’s mud brick clinic, and she, Lady Julia, had seen the immaculate girl children untouched by the knife, children as “traditional” as any in the Sudan. And every one of them had lived through the famine of 1985, when, according to the engineer’s report, the people here had had to walk out for their water, bringing back little cans of it from a well fifteen miles away.

  “What pitiable little pannikins of fluid these children lived on,” said Lady Julia, “and yet they came through! And their mothers? Even in the fury of the famine, whatever it portended—the anger of Brezhnev, the anger of Mengistu, or the anger of Allah—whatever happened, Darcy, and however small grew the drops of water in the groins of the tin cups, their mothers had not let the knives come near them!”

  Ferreweine again intruded. The barefoot doctor felt bound to point out that cases were still brought in from the remoter hills where the traditional excisors had been at work. It was only when a child began to hemorrhage beyond control that the grandmothers let them be rushed to the clinic. But once such a practice as this began to die, Ferreweine explained, then it died quickly. Because it was obvious the world did not fall apart when girl children were no longer mutilated. Here—it was obvious again—the world had already fallen apart in any case. And so for the knife, for the sharp stone or the razor, there was no excuse!

  When—after midnight—it was time for me to find the truck for Nacfa, Lady Julia and I hugged each other and she walked outside with me. Even after the lantern light of Ferreweine’s clinic, the stars were vivid. The dust still blew.

  “I am sad to see you left to the company of the unspeakable Henry,” she told me. She belched slightly. “Give the scoundrel my best wishes.”

  Half gone with the sewa, I could still tell she wanted to speak to me out of the barefoot doctor’s hearing. The feverishness I’d seen in her inside, which had fed her slightly disordered eloquence, still sat in her undissipated.

  “I had the sharpest experience this afternoon,” she told me. “Speaking of knives, it was the equivalent of a knife. I was talking to a peasant woman, a girl of about twenty-seven. Not a well woman at all. Anemic, and so on. She was holding a four-year-old daughter on her lap, a child of quite satisfactory health. Now, the operation is generally done about the age of five, but this woman promises it won’t be done. I had no guarantees, yet I was suddenly convinced the woman was telling me the truth. This woman, who would still be called a girl in the West, though here she’s already middle-aged. And the suspicion I’ve had for some years—a merely notional suspicion up until now—that Aunt Chloe needn’t have died, that all that might indeed have been the way Denis saw it—a needless intrusion—struck me so fiercely that I couldn’t find my breath. And I saw that all the years of argument were futile. I am a witness to this question, Darcy. No more. I had never actually seen myself in those terms. I mean, I’d thought of myself as a doer. Quite a shock, I can tell you. Quite a shock …”

  I heard her voice break off into tears.

  “Henry is right. I am an old imperialist dragon, and we old empire types want to make the great alterations ourselves. I’m sorry. I’m being very silly.”

  There was more choking. I put my arm around her. What spare yet comfortable, round, inhabited shoulders they were.

  “Perhaps I should just concentrate on visiting my grandchildren,” she murmured.

&nbs
p; And then she had vanished. Back to Ferreweine, back to the large question, without allowing me to mutter any prosaic comfort at all.

  I felt bereft and considered following her inside again. For some time I stood in Endilal’s night looking at the hint of light through the clinic blackout. There were two sage women in there, conversing in Arabic, and I yearned to be back with them.

  I knew that if Lady Julia were quick to publish the articles she meant to write about her Eritrean findings, they would steal some of my chances of freelance publication. It didn’t seem very important here, with the sleep of the swollen-headed children rising all around me in the dark.

  Nacfa

  The loss of Julia and Christine seemed suddenly compensated for when Salim Genete’s beautiful cousin Amna Nurhussein rose out of a hole in the ground outside Nacfa, under a waning moon.

  This apparition took place by one of those EPLF filling stations. Seeing the truck appear in the half light, other people had risen as if from the earth along with Amna. It was the sort of crowd I was getting used to—soulful-looking Eritrean soldiers with shawls wrapped around their heads against the night chill; mechanics from the regional garages, traveling on business or visiting relatives; militiamen—like the ones on the plateau above Jani—in peasant clothes. Apart from her paramilitary drab, Amna was still wearing the striped Italianate shirt she’d worn when I first saw her, and it still looked freshly put on.

  Moka had Tecleh stop. Between Amna and him there was the predictable shoulder-bumping, the normal greetings about wheat and health. Teeth—hers and Moka’s—scrupulously cleaned with olive twigs, glittered in the dark. Her eyes flickered upward toward the cabin of the truck and saw Henry and me there.