To Asmara

by Thomas Keneally

  “Good night,” she said to us in her sharp-edged, penetrating English.

  Henry, nodding back, whispered to me, “Great-looking girl.”

  “Has Salim’s son arrived in Orotta yet?” I asked her.

  “Not yet,” she said. I could hear the click of her tongue against those little stonelike syllables.

  She’d confused my image of her by turning up here. Despite what I’d seen of her in Orotta, when she’d hitched a ride to the hospital, I hadn’t expected her to stick round in this high barren land waiting in holes in the ground for the chance of transport. I crawled into the back of the truck, so that she could sit in the front beside Henry. He carried on a brief, practical conversation about the roads and the weather and the Jani bombing and how he hadn’t expected to see her again so soon—all of this before the truck started up again.

  She was on her way to visit friends in Nacfa, or so she said.

  I watched her turbanned head jolting as we entered the bombed town, and my first sight of it was framed by the gap between the slope of her head and shoulder on one hand, and Henry’s body on the other.

  I wondered if Henry was thinking the same, embarrassing, paperback kind of thoughts I was: Thrown together on a dangerous frontier, etc., etc. Yet in view of Fryer River, I knew it was childish to give space to any feeling for a woman like Amna, whose life was so essentially removed from me, essentially beyond my imagining.

  The city of Nacfa, holy in the Eritrean perception as Guernica, Coventry, Jerusalem might be in the perception of others, had in spite of all its wreckage the look of one of those places where, given a chance, civilization would pitch. It stood in a high bowl among the kind of mountains which seemed to guarantee a rainfall. Through it a good, clear mountain river ran. You crossed its stones as you came into town through a northern suburb of wrecked and formerly substantial villas, all quite roofless. Roofed, they were probably Italian in style. What a polished life Eritrean traders and officials of the Italian empire must once have lived here, in this town which marked a boundary between the Islamic plains of the Red Sea and the Coptic Christian highlands.

  What was left of plaster on the ruined walls of all the town indicated that its color was once golden—golden schools, yellow offices, yellow rows of shops, a golden mosque whose minaret still stood (a symbol, of course, since it had survived the MIGs). In the late afternoon the minaret glowed with what you could fancifully call a golden assertiveness against the brown western hills.

  Our bunker in Nacfa (since I always seem to start with whatever warren we occupy): It stood on the edge of a large garden pocked with bomb craters. Eritreans who lived in the ruins grew crops of tree seedlings, black pepper, cabbages, and tomatoes there, kept rabbits from Kenya and California, and raised chickens. Once, judging by remains of walls and ornamental gates, this had been the garden of an aristocrat, one of those Eritrean nobles with whom the Italians entered into a social contract for the control of their sweet Red Sea colony.

  Before our door lay an exploded rocket of the type the Eritreans nicknamed “Stalin organs.” It had sown lumps of shrapnel round the hillside and the edge of the garden. Moka looked at the body of the rocket, the tassels of steel which grew from it, testimony of the force with which it had landed and done its apparently futile business. He picked it up and hurled it into the undergrowth.

  Rats lived there. A leisurely convoy of three appeared atop the garden fence and made off to spend a day among the chickens and the vegetables. They moved like masters in Nacfa.

  From the outside the bunker was simply a mound, and the door was deeply recessed in the mound and led by a narrow corridor into a sort of living room lined with clay platforms. The walls had been painted, a design meant to represent the drapes of a nomad tent, tent flaps hanging by rings from poles.

  “Nice touch,” said Henry. “Poignant!”

  Off this living area was a bedroom, bare-floored, where Henry and I were told to put our gear. Amna stood in the doorway, her small kit bag hung on her shoulder. She smiled evenly at us as we disposed our sleeping bags and air mattresses around the floor, Henry expressing his usual desire for privacy by setting his in the far corner.

  The light in the living area came from outside, up the deep entrance corridor. But in the room Henry and I shared it entered through a hole in the roof, a shaft lined with planks and perhaps six or eight feet deep.

  “You should have this room,” I suggested to Ms. Nurhussein with creaky gallantry.

  “Not at all,” she said in that choppy, melodious voice, before vanishing. “You are the guests.”

  Henry and I lay on our bedding experimentally and looked at the ceiling, which was canvas and lath suspended from the roof logs. Lizards and rats were busy in the air spaces between the logs.

  There was often shelling in the late afternoons, when the dusk was ennobling the hills to violet. Shells fell outside the bunker with a concussion I could feel in my spine, but all that deep crafty work with soil and logs protected us. Moka, lying on a clay platform, would tell us in a sleepy voice exactly what was happening above our heads. “Seventy-six-millimeter,” Moka would say indolently, not bothering to open his eyes. “Stalin organ,” he might sigh. These racks of rockets, before firing and in their recumbent state, did resemble organ pipes. “One-hundred-and-twenty-two-millimeter,” he might say of the basso crump of the Ethiopians’ biggest Russian-made cannon. The Ethiopians, he said, thought troops moved through the city at night, and the frontline tanks and artillery were all around us. The remnants of population, soldiers on leave, and bureaucrats like Amna could be found there, too, on the edges or passing through.

  The fact that shelling usually began in the later afternoon was read by Moka as a sign of Ethiopian terror and disorientation. They wanted, he said, to make the night as loud with sound as the day had been with light. Moka would go on reading his novel throughout—it was a book by Han Suyin—and would occasionally ask me about this or that usage of English. A serious student. The Ethiopian artillery was merely a background to his classes in English idiom.

  He might look up only to comment, to claim, for example, that in these circumstances of undifferentiated, panicky artillery duels, the rebels replied only with one battery of 76-millimeter, large enough to make a statement, small enough not to waste value. The lessons of the battle of the Somme and of Guadalcanal had not been lost, he would say.

  It made my flesh creep the way Amna would arrive from her “friends’ places” somewhere in Nacfa during these bombardments. It is too dramatic to say that the town was full of flying shrapnel, but the shrapnel did fly and high explosive made craters on the edges of the town. By the light of a kerosene lamp provided by the Department of Public Administration I would see her turbanned head bow to enter our bunker, and I would understand that she had been out among the explosions, which to her, as to most Eritreans, didn’t seem to mean more than a hailstorm.

  When Amna approached the bunker from the direction of the ruined town and the river, I would see the outline of her large turban and the flash of the oversized, stylishly tinted glasses which she tended to wear in most lights, even the dim light of sunset, as if she were a rock singer affecting a style. She would pass the Public Administration bunker, whose tenants she of course knew. Sometimes she would call to the woman and the child who were sheltering there in the doorway, in a space as narrow and as effective as a slit trench. That four-year-old seemed to take the bombardments with the greatest composure. She had grown up with them. To her they were the traffic of the earth.

  After these pleasantries Amna would come on to our entrance-way, to our bunker with its mural of tent walls blowing in a gentle breeze—tent walls cleated as if to hold out dust, no matter who might try to raise it.

  She always went into the little side room and poured water into a powdered-milk can with a red cow painted on it. This was actually an Australian brand of powdered milk, though I never mentioned the creaky connection to Amna.

  Then
she would come back to the mouth of the entranceway. Seen from inside she was pure silhouette. Seen from just outside the door she was lit by the storm lantern by which Moka sat, deep in the living area, reading his Han Suyin novel.

  Then she would repeat that slow, beautiful, and efficient washing I’d seen outside the bunker in Orotta some weeks past. With that fall of liquid she seemed to rinse away the memory of grit from my mouth as well.

  One afternoon when Moka and I were both reading by the light of the storm lantern, I looked up when she arrived and, as she washed herself, saw great nodes of scarring on the sole of one of her feet. This might be the scarring from that original injury Salim had spoken of, the one which still occasionally reduced her to a hobble and forced her to go to Doctor Neroyo for vitamins.

  Tentatively, as she went on washing, I drew Henry’s attention to her. I was reluctant to do so. But he did know Africa. Maybe he could explain the scar tissue.

  “This is Africa, my friend. You know that. Jesus, there’s thousands of things might scar an African girl. Between the creeds and the goddam tribes and the powers. What do you expect?”

  Even by day the bombed and abandoned city had an invisible life. One of the bunkers along the bank of the stream by the garden, for example, was occupied by a husband and wife from the lantern-providing Eritrean Department of Public Administration. The bunker next to that belonged to the horticulturalist. He was a graduate of the University of San Diego. He ran a clandestine school, an agricultural college, on the hill behind our bunker, giving a husbandry and agriculture crash course for Eritrean farmers—some of them sixteen, some of them sixty, brought in from the north and east and west, some of them even smuggled through the lines. During our wait at Nacfa, we occasionally went and visited them in their unofficial, unroofed, shell-pocked polytechnic on the hill.

  “Most of my Western friends are experts on grass for golf courses,” the horticulturalist told us. “There is enough work in Southern California alone for every one of them.” On his blind slope behind the front, he seemed indulgent about the Southern Californians playing their golf.

  From these visits and conversations with people like the grass-grower, I found out that Amna was a pharmacist by training, that she had never studied in the West until now. These days she was doing, she said, an undergraduate course in history and politics at a university in Frankfurt.

  “But I did not bring my texts with me,” she said.

  Amna: Networking

  Although Amna spent her days going from bunker to bunker, fact-finding, as she said—networking—she would come back across the stones of the river beyond the garden to dine with us. She did not want to make any inroads on her friends’ limited rations, but she also liked the pasta the Public Administration woman in the next bunker cooked for us. Pasta was not usual Eritrean rations. It was considered a supreme delicacy, and the woman next door sowed canned mackerel in it to give it greater body still. The bowl came to us carried in the middle of a broad circle of injera on a tray.

  I was amused by this frankly uttered taste of Amna’s, especially since her appetite was so minute. Henry and Moka and Amna and I sat on ammunition boxes, winding up spools of pasta on our forks, sharing from the communal bowl. Of all of us, Moka was the heartiest eater. Amna ate mere strands of the spaghetti, single crumbs of mackerel, and very slowly.

  Because the bowl was common, Moka and Amna prepared for the meal with copious washing. And after the washing, it was better for the spirit, even for the stomach, to have two rebel eaters share the pasta like this. Slowly the injera bread became patterned with strands of spaghetti. Inhibitions were lost.

  Sometimes when Amna turned up in the evenings, Henry and I were already at the door of the bunker, watching the flashes from the Ethiopian lines, feeling the impact in our feet and bones as, from nearby hills, the bombardment picked up drifts of parched topsoil. I suppose we now saw ourselves as veterans, unlikely to be driven underground by anything except intense attack. Earth was being blended with air; disks of shrapnel sought out the arms which planted the reforesting tree or the chives bush, though at this hour all the reforesting arms were deep below ground, tearing fragments of injera and scooping up the lentils which were too hot for Henry and me to eat.

  Henry would grow feverishly angry as the sky flashed and the earth moved—a different sort of ire than he showed when confronted by rebel skillfulness. “To pay for that,” he said, pointing, “he makes the peasants grow navy beans. This is fucking coffee and navy beans and tomato paste converted into high explosive!”

  I decided late one night, after Henry had gone to the other room, to spring the question on Moka. I interrupted his novel-reading.

  “Do you know a man named Tessfaha?”

  “There are lots of Tessfahas,” he wheezed, holding his book in a way that told me he meant to return to it as soon as he could manage.

  I adopted a manner, including a sort of pensive clapping of my clenched fists and a sideways glance, which was meant to let him know he wouldn’t get too much peace from me until he had answered properly.

  “Are we waiting for Tessfaha? I mean, the man who spoke to me in London.”

  “Tessfaha isn’t coming here,” said Moka blankly and, I thought, without much sympathy for my confusion.

  “Then what?” I asked, angry. “What will happen?”

  “We’ll go into the line when our escorts are ready.”

  “Is Amna in our party?”

  Moka suddenly reverted to his breathy, compassionate norm.

  “I don’t know. She moves on her own. She should not be here. Afan, the Dergue’s secret police, treated her so badly. But Amna moves on her own. Her own boss.” He tapped the novel he was reading as if he’d gotten this last phrase from it.

  “I want to be kept informed,” I said, but Moka nodded so genially that I was already, against my best instincts, halfway appeased.

  Amna and Moka between them went on keeping us busy while we waited for a sign or an order from Colonel Tessfaha. By day, wearing our dun clothing, we would move over the hill behind the bunker to visit the gunners and the tank people. The front trench itself ran along a high ridge two miles ahead of us. Great sounds and enormous pillars of dust moved across these hills whenever the Ethiopians fired. I found it very fantastical to be traveling with a beautiful bureaucrat in a turban and a wheezy veteran, making social calls in such a landscape. Social they were. All the older soldiers, men and women, seemed to know Amna and Moka and exchanged fraternal shoulder bumps, the third bump, the one that had to do with wheat, slow and emphatic and like an embrace.

  It was particularly Amna who attracted intense greetings. Old friends of hers emerged from holes and ran hallooing across earth widely covered with lumps of shrapnel, the scything metal we had heard landing during the past evenings. Across this ground, too, moved lines of young soldiers going to class in brush shelters scattered amid groves of cactus.

  Amna’s friends would show off their dug-in cannon to us, the Soviet markings, the calibrations and instruction plates in Cyrillic script. We met the 23-millimeter, which had two months past brought down a MIG-23; the 37-millimeter guns, which were murder to tanks; the 78-millimeters draped in their camouflage tarpaulins, their barrels in sleeves of canvas to keep the dust out. Amna never asked any questions. She stood back with a neutral face, neither smiling nor frowning. She always let Henry and I attend to all that.

  Behind the batteries, remnants of injera bread sat desiccating on the rocks. They would be ground up to make sewa, the opaque, sour liquor Ferreweine and Lady Julia and I had drunk so plentifully in Endilal.

  We would visit the tanks, too, backed into earth garages hacked into the slopes and covered with logs. When the tank crews saw us coming, they would immediately disappear inside the machines and emerge with their tank helmets on. They made us sit in the things, look through the gun sights, and pay attention to the place, repaired with epoxy resin, where the shell which had killed the Ethiopian crew of
the tank during its service with the Dergue had entered the machine’s steel apron.

  Amna said little throughout all this. It was always Moka who urged us to consider the strange histories of those large beasts called T-55s. Made in the Urals, shipped to Africa, demonstrated to Ethiopian regulars by a Russian expert, captured at Mersa Teklai or Barentu with their heroes dead inside them or already fled, now ready to roll in Nacfa, to probe a flank in Sahel, to defend—if things turned bad—a retreat through this holy, razed city with its unbeaten yellow minaret. And the Russian manual, the key to all the tank’s uses, captured intact inside it, translated into the tongue for these lanky boys in their strange helmets.

  One afternoon a pensive Henry sketched a gun crew in action. A very good sketch with the distant ridge of trench line exactly rendered. No one seemed to object to this verisimilitude. Moka didn’t choose to confiscate the thing. I believe Amna Nurhussein would have laughed at him if he had.

  “Where is your wife, Mr. Timothy Darcy?” she asked one afternoon during a bombardment. She was obviously certain I had a wife.

  No, she wasn’t in England, I told Amna. She was somewhere in tropical Australia. For mysterious reasons I could not myself understand, I’d meant to pretend that the marriage was still alive. Or at least afflicted only with the sort of remoteness found in Eritrean marriages—the marriage, for example, of that superb little speaker who had kept Moka awake and me tormented in Jani.

  But I understood that “tropical Australia” was a strange term to use—it gave too much away by its inexactness.

  “My wife and I don’t live together,” I admitted. I amazed myself by blushing. I had the residual vanity not to want her to believe that this was one of those average first-world separations, caused by the pedestrian griefs of suburban marriage. I found I took a shabby moral pride in the idea that my marriage had been singularly cursed. But I couldn’t convey that. “My wife lives with someone else now,” I confessed.