To Asmara

by Thomas Keneally

  I noticed that, as if she intended to return home one day, Christine souvenired one of the plastic bags marked in green lettering MANUFACTURED BY THE PHARMACEUTICAL DEPARTMENT OF THE EPLF.

  She led us to a bay in a bunker where we met an antibiotic capsule machine from Bologna punching out its forty thousand capsules per shift. She soberly watched it extrude its particolored product, but Henry hung back and seemed defeated. He lingered at the door and did not want to know anything. He made pointed suggestions, again and again, about going back to the guest house.

  We did not meet Lady Julia again until we were nearly back to our truck. I managed to fall behind the others with her. I wanted to hear her balanced answers.

  “Impressive,” she said. I was disappointed at first. She’d used the adjective in a measured way, like a dowager visiting a private school for an art show. I wanted an enthusiast. Then, all at once, she became one. She stopped and considered me. “I don’t wish to be quoted, Darcy. I’m under their influence, and I have to get away from the enchantment before I can speak reliably. That aside, let me say I get the impression that these people have taken flight! I mean, flight. They are jumping a gulf which no other race has jumped, Darcy. You get the impression therefore that these people are it! The link! A new level of moral being! Very disturbing, Mr. Darcy. Especially since outsiders, hearing a person speak like this, might think one had less than the full weight between the ears.”

  “Not me,” I told her. “I think it’s all absolutely bloody startling.”

  “Oh yes,” she murmured.

  Waiting by the truck, Henry gave me a particular kind of look. “Excitement’s cheap, Darcy!” he warned me.

  He paused and leaned against the trunk of one of the African pines growing in the valley bottom.

  For the rest of the night I couldn’t sleep or rid myself of a childlike exhilaration. To me the valley of Orotta was like a carnival park of the moralities. As Lady Julia had implied, there the greatest human fantasy, the fantasy of perfectability, displayed its glittering, supremely complex and supremely simple wheels. And dazed and giddied the spectator! Lady Julia and me, anyhow.

  “It is not only the hospital,” announced Lady Julia Ashmore-Smith the next morning on the terrace.

  Salim Genete, the middle-aged and turbanned Eritrean in the business jacket, was there. His son had again failed to arrive during the night.

  Lady Julia had been in the small hours into the bunker in the valley where the exercise books were manufactured by a woolly-haired girl who had lost a leg on the Hallal Front. Now she held up an exercise-book cover Moka had given her, a memento to go with Christine’s plastic infusion bag.

  This was over breakfast—wheat and unleavened bread and sweet tea—on the terrace. She spoke low. She had already detected the bewilderment in Henry and could not utterly forgive it. I could see in the way she spoke the stubbornness with which she must have hunted down the mind of poor Sir Denis, her District Commissioner husband.

  Henry, an edge to his voice, said, “So the Memsahib is pleased at all the Sambo cleverness?”

  Lady Julia surprised me by not taking offense. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Yes, I suppose I must sound like an old-fashioned imperialist. But there you are! That’s the world I was raised in.”

  Henry hurled out the remnants of his tea onto the stones. The morning sun sucked it up almost instantly.

  Salim stood up, craned his neck for a view across the valley, and sang, “Ah, my poor kinswoman.”

  For a time I thought he meant Lady Julia. His mind had certainly been on her. He had watched Christine and the Englishwoman as they rinsed out their soiled shirts at the washing drum beneath the terrace. “Two generations of women talking together,” he had sighed. “Ai, a fine sight!”

  But he wasn’t speaking of Lady Julia now. We followed his eyes, which were fixed on a point down the defile. Three figures had emerged from the Department of Information bunker. Two tall men were supporting between them a hobbling figure in turban and shawl and jeans. I guessed they were making for the clinic. I recognized the figure in the middle as the woman called Amna, who had sat with us so tranquilly and without saying much at the coffee ceremony.

  “Is she ill?” Lady Julia asked Salim.

  Salim said, “Milady, oh yes. She gets swellings of the legs and joint pains. The Ethiopians treated her badly, you know. Afan, the Ethiopian police. She should be in Frankfurt with her physiotherapist, but she is very stubborn.”

  I found it hard to identify the hobbling being I could now see with the Italianate elegance I’d admired the day before.

  Salim told us, “Neroyo will give her injections of vitamins. Ciao, Amna!” He returned to his seat again. “She is in fact a kind of niece of mine, the daughter of my cousin the pharmacist from Asmara.”

  The nonappearance of his son now seemed to leave him all the less composed at seeing his relative stumbling among the shale, being eased along in the daylight at an hour when, wide open to the bomb sights of the MIGs, the Eritreans did not normally go looking for vitamins.

  Something About Salim

  Salim’s habits of mind were not those of the revolutionary. We could all tell that by his Empire loyalist interest in the correct mode of address for Lady Julia. He was instead a kind of Jefferson figure, a man who’d rather do business and be a Rotarian than join a liberation front.

  He was frank in confessing all this to me. His ancestry derived from a particular coastal Cushitic tribe who had always done jovial business and tried to avert their eyes from history’s great steamroller. His grandparents had spoken Saho and Arabic and some Italian, and dealt in shells, salt, bone meal. His father was a civil engineer engaged in the construction of piers and warehouses in the great port of Massawa. The family had lived offshore in a villa on the handsome island named Talud. Only the poorest of folk lived over the causeway in the mainland suburbs of Massawa, said Salim, beneath the hot brow of the coastal massif.

  From these mountains above the port, however, snaked down a trade road as old as the kingdom of Axum and much appreciated by whoever ruled the Red Sea coast. Salim’s family, said Salim himself, had a traditional skill for getting on with the manifold administrations which either came ashore with the tide or descended down the road from the massif. There was a tradition of offering accommodation, of finding your new niche, of adapting your ways adequately though not crucially.

  “If you live like us on the Red Sea, right at its neck, the Babel Mandeb, the mouth of the bottle, then you’ve done business with everyone. You have sold and bought from the Coptic highlanders. You have sold salt and lentils to Christopher da Gama as he landed to help the Massawa garrison against the Imam of Harar, the grand Mohammed Ibrahim. You have certainly done business with the Turks, who held fast to Massawa until the Italians came. I suppose, if the truth be told, our lives were like those of Jews in Russia or Poland, or of Jews in the Yemen, for that matter. There weren’t grounds for us to work up any national fervor, whether in favor of the occupiers or against them.”

  His grandparents, for example, saw the Italians become interested in Massawa Island and the Gulf of Zula, then watched without regret as the Turks marched off. After four hundred years of doing business!

  Salim was a child of eleven when he beheld the Red Sea Eritrean port of Massawa fill up with Italian naval vessels, with the sort of ferries whose bows come down and from which drive forth battalions of armored vehicles. From Massawa the Italians would invade in 1935 the empire of the Ethiopians, the kingdom of the Negus, the squat Chosen One, the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie.

  Let me make an abstract of Salim’s subsequent history, drawing both on his superior whimsy and my lesser brand. The Italians lost Eritrea and Ethiopia very quickly in 1941 to British forces operating from the Sudan. Salim’s family was content enough, even though some of the highland intellectuals were agitating for independence. Salim’s father, another kind of Eritrean altogether, became mayor of Massawa during the Bri
tish occupation. The port in those days was host to countless British naval vessels, on all of which father and son had been welcomed to drinks parties. Salim and his father were both, according to the Prophet’s command, abstainers—but politely and discreetly so, no fanatics. They knew that human beings from the larger world answered in their behavior a quite exotic and farfetched range of imperatives, desires, prohibitions, and commandments, and that it was gentlemanly to be cool about these things.

  Eritrea was federated by vote of the UN with the Emperor’s Ethiopia six or seven years after the end of the World War. There had been no referendum to get the approval of the Eritreans to this forced twining of the two nations, and in Asmara and even on the coast Eritrean intellectuals and agitators seemed aggrieved by the new federal arrangement. The young engineer Salim took it with traditional calm. With his wife and two young sons, he moved down the coast to the extreme southern zone of Eritrea, the province called Danakil, after the tribe who inhabited it. His new job was in the bay of Aseb, a rainless and scorching zone, the least rained-on port on earth. In the face of a glittering Red Sea, the great energetic sun was impotent to produce a rainfall of any meaning, a dew, a tentative shower. Yet the Emperor and the West had large plans for Aseb. Bunkering, oil refineries, berths, a bitumen road to feed into the highway from Addis to Asmara. The young engineer Salim became a town councilor, then mayor. He was president, too, of the Chamber of Commerce, which had grown out of the old Italian Società di Navigazione Rubattino.

  He expected to have to swallow certain items of Ethiopian hubris. After the Emperor canceled the federation and simply took Eritrea over as a fiefdom, all public examinations were conducted in Amharic. But his sons were sufficiently clever to take that language to memory as well. Sometimes the Ethiopian garrison behaved savagely and on various pretexts—searches for weapons, Arabist agitators, or contraband—slaughtered encampments of the Afar tribes-people who shared the zone. Salim was driven to conclude that these slaughters were countenanced by the Emperor’s government.

  The Ethiopian forces in the hinterland of Aseb, in breathless and rainless Danakil, were largely Coptic Christians, like the highland Eritreans. The coastal Muslims therefore came to believe that the massacres along the dry wadis of Danakil were somehow inspired by their Eritrean brothers and sisters in the highlands. Killings and the burning of tents and villages were good policy, Salim could see. They stopped an Eritrean common cause from forming.

  Salim Genete found himself a functionary of the Ethiopian government now, a civilian administrator likely to be appointed anywhere. Already the sons and daughters of old colleagues from Aseb and Massawa were slipping away northwestward over the massif to join this faction or that of Eritrean rebels. His own sons, however, were admitted to the University of Addis. There, he hoped, they avoided political groups, particularly Eritrean ones.

  “As the Emperor got weaker,” Salim said, “he retreated in time. From being an imitation of a modern head of state, he began to take on the appearances and utter the edicts of another time, of the time of, say, Charlemagne. There were agents everywhere—in every city, in Aseb itself—and all of them straining to find the news which could feed the Emperor’s failing ear, feed its appetite for hearing the worst. Did the empire fall? No, it performed the disappearing trick. Instead of breathing the air of this century, it tried to breathe the vanished air of some other. It choked in a vacuum.”

  In the Emperor’s last days, Salim was anxious because now he knew his sons had grown political and so—in police-ridden Addis—endangered. When the Emperor was deposed, however, and driven away from the New Palace in a Volkswagen, Salim rejoiced. Now his sons were safe. With other brilliant boys and girls they were laughing in the streets of the racy suburb of Mercato, laughing up at the hills where the Menelik Palace stood and where the Lion of Judah occupied a few rooms under the guard of the aggrieved officers who had now taken command.

  Salim says with touching emphasis that he was ready to pretend to be a Marxist if that was what the new Ethiopian government, the Dergue, required; if that was the banner under which the people were fed, the children educated, the tongues of the Eritreans liberated, the nomads and villagers of Danakil left to their traditional devices.

  Of course, both he and his sons were to be disappointed. For Mengistu, chairman of the Dergue, vested all the prestige of Ethiopia in the extinction not only of the Eritrean languages but, with them, of the Eritrean mouths.

  It was suddenly more, not less, horrifying; more, not less, risky; more, not less, erratic a business to work as a civil administrator hand-in-hand with an uncontrolled military. Salim told, for example, of a friend and fellow member of the Aseb Chamber of Commerce, Doctor Berhai, owner of a Mercedes 380SE. Three members of the Aseb garrison coveted it. They had Berhai arrested for conspiracy and encouraged some of their NCOs to shoot him through the head in a poor Muslim cemetery inland. The Mercedes was backed into the belly of an Antonov transport for transfer to Addis. The transport, however, could not take off because of engine trouble, and while the air force waited for spare parts to be flown north, the back hatch of the plane stayed unabashedly open. Berhai’s 380SE could be seen glimmering headlights first across the tarmac. Air force officers saw it; the military administrator of Aseb saw it; Salim, the mayor of Aseb, saw it when he passed the airport fence on official business or when he visited the terminal to greet an undersecretary of the Dergue’s Department of Public Administration. No one protested or complained about Berhai’s car, and at last it was flown to Addis.

  The children of many of Salim’s cousins had been arrested and proved hard for him to find in Ethiopia’s chaotic prison system. And everywhere there were violations of equity, sanity, the principles of service, of honorable commerce. The hacked-off arms of young Eritrean agitators—agents, writers and printers of underground newspapers—were permitted to lie in the streets; it was no use talking to the military administrator or the police about that, no use invoking either humanity or aspects of hygiene. At the power plant the big transformers were shipped away to Addis; at the water works the pumping system was permitted to stay antique. Yet that was all that was required of Salim—the supply of water and electricity to the port town. The Ethiopians didn’t want to talk to him about much else.

  “I had to travel with the military governor everywhere he went. That was to protect the man. He had his offices next door to mine. A parable for the people to see: the civil and the military hand in hand. And camouflage and a shield for the military ruler, too! For the mayor was usually a man with friends and relatives among the Eritreans, even among the rebels. And rebels knew that bombs and volleys of fire intended for the general would also finish the mayor. Ai-ai-ai, what a situation this was!”

  After protecting the military governor of Aseb in this way for some months, Salim was all at once transferred to the western city of Keren. This was a time when the Eritrean rebels, many of them children of his old business associates, were descending from the north with captured Kalashnikovs. Keren was threatened, and with it the road and the railway to Asmara. The Ethiopian military garrison, under a Brigadier Wossef, was in a confused, uninformed, reckless state of mind. Driving to his offices in the city, Salim could hear the large 122-millimeter cannon of both sides speaking out in the plains to the west and the mountains to the north. The Ethiopian conscripts were in a terrible panic: farm boys and goatherds from Harar, Gondar, Ethiopian Somalia who did not know what in God’s name they were doing here, listening to shellfire in a threatened town.

  Salim says Brigadier Wossef, their commander, was a joke-teller, but his humor had a frightened and savage edge which Salim didn’t like. And so the journeys they undertook together and the official ceremonies within the sound of guns were tedious to Salim. The brigadier became depressed on discovering that the town was full of Eritrean rebel agents, most of them under twenty-five years of age. But because Salim’s own sons were involved in the rebel movement, the Eritrean People’s Liberat
ion Front local cells took pains not to attack garrisons which he might perforce be visiting with the brigadier.

  “For my life I was dependent on my sons,” Salim admitted with a shrug.

  A summons to Asmara separated him from Brigadier Wossef. The Dergue wanted civilian authorities from throughout Eritrea to meet in the capital, to discuss the blowing-up of power stations and water reservoirs in the face of the rebel advance. Salim left for Asmara from the market square of Keren, outside the ditch and the double wall of razor wire behind which, in a two-story building, he and the brigadier had ruled the city.

  The convoy Salim joined was long, and the drivers were tentative. As they entered the mountains, firing could be heard ahead and behind. All night the lead trucks came under hit-and-run attack, the wreckage needing to be pushed over the mountainside to make way for the vehicles behind. Among the civilian administrators gathered in Asmara, the word was that none of them would get back to their provincial seats, that the rebels were about to take everything.

  Without Salim for cover, Brigadier Wossef was himself ambushed and shot dead while escaping Keren.

  It was apparent now that all of Eritrea was about to fall to the rebels. They were in the foothills of the massif outside Massawa. They threatened the whole string of cities which lay along the old Italian railway line from Massawa to Agordat. The beaten Ethiopians, so the Eritrean administrators whispered to each other during their Asmara meetings, would now have to come to settlement with the Eritreans.