Bob Ellis

by Ellis, Bob; Brooksbank, Anne;

  One of them, when asked what he thought, said, ‘Well, everything they’ve told us about this country is wrong. They’re a nice people. It’s a good country. It’s got its faults, a few of them. But Jesus, why we’re spending two hundred billion a year on ways of blowing these people up, these people, I really don’t understand.’

  This was a fair summary of our feelings too. Later on in London, where we stayed with Doug McClelland in his ambassadorial mansion at Hyde Park Gate, Doug said he’d not gone to Russia yet for fear of being disappointed. He needn’t have worried. He won’t be.

  How to put it into words? Well, there are, for instance, poker machines in the Soviet Union, and near-nude nightclub acts in its tourist hotels, and medieval apothecaries, and octogenarian usherettes, and parrot-torturing acts, and what they call Heineken bars, where you can pick up girls, subsidised, and theatres devoted to satire and musical comedy and Chekhov and Italian opera and Shakespeare, and street stalls that sell beer – never vodka, since the edict – at seven a.m. And cities as beautiful as Paris and Venice, and art galleries full of Rembrandts and van Goghs and Picassos, and vulgar concrete resorts like Surfers Paradise, and medieval partisans employed lifelong to forge anew old statues and murals destroyed by German bombing. The entire population looks as if it’s been personally dressed by Pierre Cardin, and it’s very warm in October, and it’s entirely run by women who are the most liberated on earth and have somehow achieved a balance between femininity and strength. I hope I’ve attracted your attention by now …

  There are gaps in the fabric of course. Not all the nozzles on the showers are firmly affixed. You never know till late the day before when tomorrow’s plane is taking off. You can’t buy film, cassettes, many foreign newspapers – though the monetarist right-wing European Financial Times is inexplicably available everywhere – nor watch Sky Channel, nor easily get your clothes washed. The unchanging Intourist breakfasts – cheese, black bread, yoghurt, omelette, juice – get a bit wearing, as does the lack of taxis, the opening and closing times of the apathetic travel bureaucracy and the street-smart persistence of the slim young money-changers with their appalling American accents – official rate two American dollars to the rouble, unofficial rate three roubles to the American dollar – and so on.

  But … it’s a functioning country, not a cartoon – with breakfast television with rock clips instead of commercials, and newspaper headlines saying ‘The Russian Dream: A Home of One’s Own’. You are not – or we weren’t – prevented from moving unaccompanied around any of the cities, in the punctual trains and trolley buses, or loitering round the squalid Third World railway stations buying conversations – with American cigarettes or handfuls of lollies – and otherwise nosing about. The one KGB man we met for certain was very altruistic, dragging Roy into a lift and there with great intensity urging him not to change any more money as the penalty, even for tourists, was seven to ten years in prison. Soviet prison.

  And the tourist guides – all female, all startlingly beautiful – were very frank. ‘You do not see the elite,’ one said, ‘but they are there. They go past in black chauffeur-driven cars with drawn blinds and you never see them, but they are there, and so are the KGB.’ All expressed exasperation with the housing shortage – five years’ waiting for a flat of adequate size while you lived with your ructious in-laws, making love in the small room next to theirs. Why, we asked, in a country as big as a third of the planet, was there a shortage of building materials? There are enough trees. There’s a good deal of sandstone. ‘Yes,’ said one of the guides, ‘it’s a puzzle.’

  One, asked for the reform she most craved, said, ‘An exportable currency.’ All of them yearned for travel – Tahiti loomed large in their dream life, London, Paris; one had got as far as India and yearned for even more – but all equally wanted then to come home. Home was real and meant more than it does to us. So many had died for it, twenty million in the last war. Mother Russia was real, felt, believed and true. We saw outside Kiev a statue of Mother Russia, fist raised, garbed like Boadicea, two hundred feet high. A tribal divinity truly, one you suddenly understood. Underneath her was a war museum.

  All over the Western Soviet Union are war museums, and monuments to battles fought on these very streets: partisans massacred here; the town mayor executed here. The war is very real. They do not want another, and they never did. The foremost Big Lie of the twentieth century is that they did, and do: billions and billions spendable on schools and creches and hospitals have been wasted in the West on this wicked, avaricious lie – rockets built never to be used, great land armies at the ready never to be deployed, playing cards and drinking Coke down long and weary decades in the service of this lie. Thank God this year the lie began at last to fade.

  Russia is … what? Another country. A big and various one in a process of modest change. Interesting to visit. The people are very honest. They pursue you down the street to return the wallet you have dropped, as they do in England. You should go there. It will greatly assist your peace of mind.

  The Inessential Ellis (first published in The Sydney Review, November 1988)

  ERITREA, 1994

  I’m in Eritrea, far from the madding world, and having as rare a time as I’ve had in my life, in the dry heat and sweet honesty of a people humbling in their courage and goodness. One goes a long, long mile to a more inspiring destination – Orwell’s Catalonia perhaps, before it was traduced, or Danton’s Paris before the Great Terror. Their curious mixture of sophistication and lack of guile, an innocent knowingness, together with a kind of humorous puritanism – no-one is unfaithful to his wife, and no-one fails to laugh about it – that may come from the Coptic religion, but I’m not sure. Their faces, which are European but black, and their mode of dress – watch chains and waistcoats and pork pie hats – give me the impression that these are the basic stock, flourishing by the Euphrates, out of which all Europeans, Indians, Arabs and Jews mutated. It feels like coming home to one’s true kinfolk, after sad long years of persecuted exile, shamefacedly, under mongrel invaders. These are the people we should be, and were once, back when the world was wide. Poetry rises in the heart, and for once it feels like truth, and in among the familiar sewer smells and dusty streets and Old Testament marketplaces of the Third World, something else – in the bruised wake of their largely unknown war – is going on, something unfamiliar.

  All of them told the same story. We fought for our freedom, I did not expect to live, I had given my life to my country, I was a dead man, a dead woman already. We lived on bread and salt and water, and lentil soup as a luxury once a month maybe, under bombardment in the field for seventeen years, against weapons supplied by first the Americans and then the Soviet Union and a genocidal policy of driving us into the sea, burying sometimes ten of our fighters a day, in the time of the drought fifty a day, calling out over each buried corpse ‘Victory to the masses’. On Wednesday we would have the coffee ceremony, and talk and relax, though the shelling went on.

  We learnt to sleep while standing up, while walking even – sometimes only three seconds of sleep, sometimes five minutes, while walking under shellfire. Sleeping anyhow, men and women side by side for years. One in every three of the fighters were women, but no sexual contact, sleeping always back to back, not only on moral grounds but as well because sexual contact would mean children, and any children we had we could not keep or leave. They would have to be killed when we moved to the next battlefront. So there were no children, and there was no sex, in those seventeen years.

  Everyone I talked to had killed people, and their faces showed the soft grief of men and women who had paused at the gates of hell, and sometimes gone on in.

  The great purifying this holocaust has brought them, this trying in the fire – like seventeen years of the Australian bushfires last January – has, along with their culture and their genes and their religion, produced a nation of people recognisably heroic, Homeric in their stubborn courage. In one day I interviewed, it
seemed, Demosthenes followed by Lincoln followed by Boadicea and Sir Lancelot, and got drunk that night with Che Guevara, who was very agreeable company. All the heroes have agreed to work without wages, and only basic food and shelter, for three years, for their country. Think about that.

  I have no doubt that I sound like a fool taken in by wily serpentine foreigners, but Tom Keneally and Fred Hollows – both heroes of free Eritrea – found that what I have said here is true, and with the same amazement as I …

  I spoke to a woman, seven of whose sons and one of whose daughters went at her wish to fight in the war, who did not see them for seventeen years and did not know, till the last bullet flew and a week, a fortnight thereafter, if any of them had survived. Six sons came back – they went away teenagers and came back middle-aged – and they all now live in their parents’ house – a house at which I ate well, as an honoured guest – on no wages, living poorly, working hard, sacrificing still for the free Eritrea that is coming, that is yet to be. ‘I gave them,’ she said to me, ‘I gave them freely. It is better to live for an hour as a free person in courage than for a lifetime as a slave, in shame.’

  I watched too, for hour after hour, the uncut footage of the battle of Masawa – the thousands and thousands fleeing on foot, carrying one item of furniture, a table, a chamberpot, parents carrying children, fathers carrying grandmothers, mothers looking for daughters in the rubble of the bombed marketplace, crying children asking ‘where’s my mummy, where’s my mummy’, and the corpses, and the pieces of corpses – and I thought how wicked all news reporting on the television is now, because it takes all human suffering as read, an inevitable somehow, and talks of other things, the politics, the shakedown. Mother after mother, corpse after corpse, mutilated child after mutilated child, in the uncut footage tells a different story, of life itself, and the weight of life cut short – not the CNN myth of moderates and hardliners, free marketeers and reactionaries, cardboard villains and American interests – but death and war and blood, the song of freedom and the cancerous curse of power.

  I am going back of course, to help, if I can, set up a film festival, a film school, a feature film about Fred Hollows, and maybe a deal to export their excellent beer to guilt-struck Balmain lefties as they in turn rebuild their shattered cities and ruined railways and burnt orchards and repair the mutilated limbs of the children playing daily in the undetectable minefields left by the Ethiopians and pretend to be right-wing enough to satisfy the IMF. I have found, old fool that I am, a kind of new Jerusalem, and it’s nice to know it’s there – maybe only for a brief shining moment, like Dubchek, or Catalonia, the workers’ Camelot we dreamt of in our youth – but it’s there.

  So It Goes

  NEPAL AFTER FRED HOLLOWS, 1994

  ‘Turn right at the marijuana,’ we were told, a little mysteriously I thought, when we – Stephen Ramsey and I – asked the way to the Hollows Lens Factory in Kathmandu. The driver of the tuktuk – a small obstreperous, deafening conveyance that is best described as a cross between a tricycle, a lawnmower and an umbrella – immediately understood.

  After twenty minutes of bone-shaking and beeping risk to life and limb, we arrived. There was a dirty bridge, a filthy river, two burning corpses, a number of golden splashing children, a temple carved with penises, a monk on a hunger strike, twenty hectares of marijuana growing as untended and unremarked as paspalum and, before the factory, a brick wall being pulled down by the same Nepali workmen who had built it the day before. All of Asia, I decided, in three hundred metres. It was enough marijuana, I thought as I stood there under its flourishing greenness amazed, to pay off my entire mortgage, but my fifteen-year-old son, more worldly wise than I am, said it wasn’t worth the risk.

  They were tearing down the wall to make room for the big expected audience for King Birendra of Nepal on Tuesday. He was opening the lens factory in the company of Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, his sworn enemy, the two of them together for the first time on any stage.

  We went in. The austere brick corridors were crammed with elderly blind, silent people who looked like Bible illustrations, often two together, man and wife, sometimes lying stoic on a single stretcher, holding hands. Upstairs, in conditions of what I felt was unseemly conviviality, eye operations were occurring – two every fifteen minutes in adjacent surgeries, one of them televised – before a buoyant audience applauding, arguing, punching the Coke machine and eating sandwiches. At one point the power went off, pitching the surgery into darkness, and then operating ophthalmologist Dr Sanduk Ruit kept his hand steady on the needle in the probed pupil till it came back on. A movement of more than one-tenth of a millimetre would ensure lifelong blindness and Ruit, as ever, was patient in the dark.

  Ruit is legendary. A burly, broad-faced, fortyish Nepalese man of much calm leaderly magnetism – and of such acknowledged and celebrated surgical genius that he has turned down repeated offers of millions from the US. Until recently he did thirty-seven or forty operations a day, seven days a week, for no charge, and had been doing this for twelve years. As Fred Hollows’ principal disciple in Asia (and in his last years, his closest friend) he had inherited, or acquired, Fred’s determination to open the eyes of the Third World.

  ‘A difficult, arrogant, cantankerous man,’ he said with love, between operations, of his great unruly, rumpled mentor. ‘If you don’t do it this way, I’m going to kick your arse. Very direct, very Australian in that way. Very much the teacher in front of the classroom with the bamboo in his hand. But he understood, and he taught me to understand, that Third World countries must spend the money they get in aid properly, in learning to do things themselves. So much money we get goes back to the First World in the pockets of Western doctors taking fees – what he called medical tourists – and what is the good of that? It should stay here. I am much more of a Nepali now. Fred made me that. Fred used to say if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one meal. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.’

  Watching Ruit work – cut and scrape and stitch, and push, ever so delicately push, the new lens in under the skin of the eye – is to participate in a kind of secular miracle, like a moon probe.

  ‘It’s such a small organ, the eye,’ he says, ‘and what a big role it plays. Close your own eyes, and see how big.’ A man whose eyes are cured of blindness is no longer a passenger, he explains, no longer a burden, a social difficulty. He can earn money. He can relate. Everyone about him is happy; the entire mountain village is happy. There are no unfortunate side effects to curing blindness. It is a process, almost the only one, with no downside.

  Not charging for his thirty-seven or forty miracles a day puts a financial burden on Ruit that he wears with unpretentious, courtly, good-humoured grace, his voice retaining its musical sly chuckle always. From seven in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon, he explains, he has worked for the Fred Hollows Foundation for free. (Mike Lynskey, the red-bearded, shrewd and watchful minder of Fred’s last years on earth finally persuaded Ruit to take a modest salary in June after months of negotiations.) From four-thirty to nine he works for himself as a general practitioner for money – not much, but some. That’s seven days a week for Fred, six nights a week for himself. Between four-thirty and nine on Saturdays he has to himself and his family. This is his reward. He has had no holidays, and no weekends, for twelve years.

  ‘Why work so hard?’ I asked. ‘Why not thirty a day instead of thirty-seven?’

  ‘If I do thirty a day,’ he responded with a kind of deep, amused simplicity I can’t begin to decipher, ‘seven less people can see.’

  The cost therefore because of all this to each of his patients (walk in, walk out, like a dental surgery, with no expensive stay in hospital) is five dollars all up – regrettably as much as this, he emphasises, because of the price of the processed plastic in the lens. Next day they take the cotton wool off their eyes and they can see. It has to be this way, he says, it is part of Fred’s philosophy. The whole techn
ique has to be this cheap, was contrived to be this cheap, in order to make it accessible to people who otherwise could not afford it. He is meanwhile teaching others the technique – something so simple, Fred said, that any steady-handed plumber can do it, and requiring seven years in medical school before you are allowed to do it is ridiculous. And so the good news spreads, through the equivalent of a barefoot doctor movement, and all over Asia and Africa eyes are opening, and joy abounds. Soon, with relief, he will be only teaching, no longer operating – in ten more years perhaps – and the one million cataract cases of Nepal will by then be less. No-one knows why there are so many. It might be to do with diet or altitude, or ozone holes or sunlight itself; so many Nepalese live in the fields and in the streets, and never go indoors.

  The semi-medieval people in the mountain communities regard Ruit and his colleagues as miracle workers, as demi-gods. They come up and want to touch him, ask him to bless their children, ask for a lock of his thinning hair.

  ‘The hard part,’ he says, ‘is explaining to those whose blindness cannot be treated – who do not have cataracts, or whose cataract is too far advanced – that there is no hope. “You did it for my friend,” they say, “why will you not do it for me?” That, I think, is the most difficult part of the work, by far.’

  *

  ‘The most difficult moment for me,’ said Californian Dick Litwin, a cheerful, grey-bearded man with the face of a wily Allan Ginsberg, ‘was when I was operating in a tent by hurricane lamplight in the Himalayas and the needle was in the eye and I looked down at my bare hand – our hands have to be bare, because the work is so delicate – and saw it was covered with mosquitoes. I couldn’t slap them. I couldn’t move my hand. These are moments, as they say, that wonderfully focus the mind.’