To Asmara

by Thomas Keneally

  “Everyone starts with Tesfapaulos,” Lieutenant Wolde told her. Even the economist, he claimed, had begun with that name.

  She gave him other names, the recently escaped, and after two hours, the economist being in a coma on the tiled floor, Wolde unexpectedly let her be taken back to her horse stall.

  When she was returned to the stables, across a yard in which three women prisoners in foul and tattered dresses were cooking millet soup on an open fire, she was dispirited. “The torturers hadn’t punished me as I expected. And they took their time. Unhurried.” Their leisureliness seemed to have made an impression on her, the unhurried time they took. They had cured her, she said, of what she called “my young idea”—the idea that she was a special rebel and that they were frantic to torment her. She had to join the line, to wait to be questioned and ground down in Wolde’s mill.

  She seemed to think it was the prosaic timetable of torture, its bureaucratic slowness, which was the great danger in the end.

  By this point of her recital, I was not as preoccupied with the thump of the 122-millimeter shells over the hill and around the bunker as by her long wait—that day in 1978—for water at dusk. Suspended in thirst in the holy city of Asmara, she waited to be drowned, confused, blinded with pain—in the city thrust up eight thousand feet above the Red Sea, urbane in its climate, noted in its scholarship both Coptic and Islamic, and removed in its essential being, its refined avenues, from the Ethiopian tropics of torture.

  “I thought it was my city,” she confessed. “It was not the city of the torturers. I came to believe it belonged to the prisoners.”

  I knew I’d lost the gift to be impassioned by a city the way Amna was about Asmara. As the artillery barrage began to diminish outside the bunker, her emphasis was less on imprisonment than on that capital set on the high road from the Red Sea to the Kassala province of Sudan, on the high road, too, to Gondar and Gojjam, Ethiopia’s turbulent western reaches. She seemed to have the naive but touching idea that all the invaders wanted it exactly because it was a temperate and civilized home, but that they came to it without the appropriate talents to enjoy it. In her mind, no earthly power could feel happy without the option of a villa in Asmara.

  And Asmara never sold itself away. Asmara seemed to be, to her, Eritrea focused on a mountaintop. It never gave over to the ancient kingdom of Axum. It permitted the Turks to build towers in its foothills but never declared itself theirs. It was awarded to the Italians, in the time of the European carve-up of the Horn, but only because it was so resistant to the Ethiopian Emperor. Through the Italian and British years, sixty-two of them, Asmara—in Amna’s interpretation of history—kept its clear, high head.

  Interpreting the ceremonies of torture for me, who had never known them, Amna spoke of how she became sharply aware of their casual, ex tempore nature. One day electrodes, the next the circle of rope in which knots were tied to fit over the eyes. This rope, called “the tear-maker,” they tightened from behind when they remembered.

  “I wondered if there was a textbook,” she confessed. “Something they had from the old Emperor … or from the East Germans, who were now advising them. Was there a manual which told the order to work in? Or is it part of the science to work on whim?”

  In any case, their manner confused prisoners in a way prisoners didn’t expect to be confused. “Even the victim of torture would like to believe that he is in the hands of experts,” said Amna with a smile.

  During our talks she did not pretend that the bastinado punishment whose effects still occasionally swelled her ankles, as had happened in our defile in Orotta, wasn’t frequent or that it was comfortable. It was, however, what she’d expected to have to face. In this one regard, they hadn’t taken her by surprise. She began to wonder if the nature of her punishment, less wide-ranging than the torture of other prisoners, less physical than that of others, mightn’t be due to the influence of some important friend of her father’s.

  In our bunker, or later, the next day, sitting in the sun on the rocks by the door, she told me something of the strategies of the political prisoner. How to create a sort of mechanism in your brain so that you suffer in shifts and are numb and unreachable for stretches at a time. How you try to give a Lieutenant Wolde, who is unlikely to be a fool, an occasional sense of a dam breaking, of secrets spilling out without stint. How to space your denials and pleas and cosset the interrogator’s secretest desire, which is—according to Amna—“to be in charge of the prisoner by a little margin.”

  These skills she’d learned from observing other prisoners in their extremes of pain. Meanwhile, her parents brought her weekly food supplies and bribed officials so highly that some of it reached her.

  Football

  A long time before we could see the playing field itself, we could hear the cheers of the football crowd, above the bleating of goats and the susurrus of blowing sand.

  Moka said, with exactly the right mix of tension and excitement a man late for a football match should display, “They are already playing!”

  We came over a spur of rock to find before us, on a bowl of dust marked out with white lines, a team dressed in white jerseys and shorts and a team dressed in blue, both of them in full play. Fighting for possession of the soccer ball, they raised dust clouds.

  The crowd ran to thousands. All of them were armed. Near us, a clump of rebel men and women on a small hillock threw deep blue ribbons of shade across the field. This was the hour when on other days the Ethiopian shelling had begun. I wondered what signs had enabled the Eritreans to gauge that this afternoon would be free of bombardment, a suitable day for championship football.

  The crowd had walked two miles or more out of the trenches for this game. It was, said Moka, a final between the champion division of the Nacfa Front and the champions of Hallal. And there was that atmosphere of a great sporting event—the ambience of a contest which had teased away at people’s imaginations and hopes for a week or so. I noticed that Henry was taken by the intense crowd on the hill above the ground and sketched them, along with their thin shadows.

  It was a sophisticated game, there in the dust. At the halfway mark stood a truck with a loudspeaker, and someone commentated in Tigrinyan. As moments of crisis arose in offense or defense, his voice took on the sharp acceleration of a professional broadcaster.

  The goalkeeper of the Nacfa Front was under recurring attack from the Hallal forwards. Blue Nacfa defenders collided with white attackers in mists of saffron dust. Eritrean infantrywomen along the sidelines dragged their shawls across their mouths and shrilled through the cloth.

  Apart from the broadcast truck, the Eritreans had appointed what was clearly one of Masihi’s cameramen to the match—he was at the far end of the ground, with a sound assistant. He caught all the action amid the dust columns. As the Hallal champions scored and the Nacfa Front women sitting in front of us let their shawls fall from their faces and uttered guttural moans, he did a panning shot of them.

  Through all this, Moka and Amna were off far up the sideline, performing their usual greetings with only half an eye for the action. But the Nacfa Front players had begun to strike back, bringing the ball up the wing, and the cameraman and his sound man followed it down the sideline at the jog.

  I could see now that the sound technician was a girl, her head swathed in the standard Arab-style shawl. And from the turban on the cameraman’s head, I should have been able to tell at once that it was Masihi. It was quite obvious now, anyhow.

  The referee, a soldier in jeans and khaki shirt, awarded the Nacfa Front team a penalty kick. I saw Masihi nodding while filming, urging his daughter in with the mike so that the thunk of the ball as it left the Nacfa Front kicker’s foot would be picked up above the wind. Christine obediently moved the black ovoid of the mike to produce the best effect. In the midst of this movement, she saw me and smiled. It was not exactly the smile she had brought to the Sudan, not that watery rictus which I’d found so hard to interpret. It was almost an
Eritrean smile, very broad, very subtle, a certain breathlessness to it. But she could not say anything yet. She had her job to do.

  The corner kick came to nothing. Some very clever Hallal Front defenders took the ball far upfield after there had been one token attempt at goal by the Nacfa center forward. I found Amna at my side. “They are losing,” she said, smiling broadly with a fake regret.

  “It’s Masihi and Christine,” I told her, pointing to the camera crew.

  “They will show this film all over Eritrea, wherever there is a video machine,” said Amna. “This is our civil war.”

  In her shawl, pushing forward with her mike, Christine suddenly looked like a pretty Palestinian. That was very simply it, I thought. She had the appearance of someone who’d found unexpectedly the ideal job.

  “He’s making use of his daughter,” said Amna. I heard again her extraordinary Eritrean laugh. “You do not talk to Masihi long,” she said fondly, “before you become either sound or film.”

  The surge at the other end of the field produced a goal for the Hallal division. They embraced each other, plying their shoulders. It struck me that here, in this bowl between hills, were some thousands of disappointed spectators armed with automatic weapons and with stick and round grenades. And yet none of these arms were fired, none of the grenades flourished or thrown. The goal score was absolute and it decided things. It was not like the decision of the UN. It was like the decision of God. The Nacfa Front was being beaten, and no armaments could help.

  Hallal scored again and the Nacfa crowd groaned rhythmically, like a Biblical race. After a further spate of unconstructive attack by the Nacfa Front, the referee blew a conclusive blast and spread his arms. He must have seen the gesture from tapes the EPLF pirated from British television. On this field above all others, his gesture, palms down, was appropriate, since it seemed to settle both the dust and the gale. Players embraced and the crowd picked up their AK-47s and began to trail back toward their trenches. I saw Masihi doing what I think is called a tracking shot, across the ground and to the sudden single line of EPLF troops sloping home to their bunkers and trenches. He signaled his daughter that she could now stop recording. She muttered something into the mike. It looked like a long-practiced identifying mutter. I remembered she had said she’d done sound for the young filmmakers at her polytechnic.

  Soon, still carrying their gear, the Malmédys had crossed the corner of the field and were welcoming us. I noticed a long, close welcome between Amna and Masihi, no more intimate than any she had exchanged along the front line in days past. Yet I found myself spending a childish amount of time worrying what this one might mean. I abominated that feeling, that murderous little proprietary glimmer, the beginning of madness. Masihi finished wishing Amna “Cernai,” wheat, and came to me and shook hands with European restraint.

  “She is very good,” he told me solemnly, nodding toward his daughter. “I didn’t know what to expect, and so I thought, Keep her busy!” He laughed robustly. “And she is very good.”

  I said I was delighted to hear it.

  His eyes shifted and he lowered his voice. “And you were very kind to her, Darcy.”

  “Not at all.”

  But he insisted. “No, no. You were very kind.”

  I must have looked baffled. I wasn’t aware of being abnormally kind.

  “She was disturbed when you first met her,” Masihi whispered. “And you did everything the right way.”

  I was still working that out when Christine arrived at my side, her sound equipment jiggling on her hip, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. It was a very adult, composed kiss. She began asking me lively questions about our recent journey—Henry’s and mine—since we’d last seen each other in the flour-white scrub at Jani. She asked after Lady Julia, who—I told her—was discovering amazing things in Endilal.

  I asked if she had been back to Orotta.

  “Yes,” she said. “And I saw Mr. Salim.”

  “He’s still there?”

  “Waiting for his son.”

  “No, not everyone is as successful at finding people as you are, Christine,” I told her. I told her, too, that her father thought she was good at this cinematic stuff. She seemed to flush with pleasure but to take the compliment confidently, like an adult woman. “I might stay a long time,” she said. “You will need to give my regards to that Sudanese police sergeant at the border.”

  “I always expected I might need to,” I confessed.

  Then she lowered her voice. “I may go through the lines, recording sound for my father. He’s been there a hundred times.”

  “Be very careful,” I said. I was still puzzling out what Masihi had meant by ‘disturbed.’”

  “Darcy,” she said suddenly in her most pedantic English. “You should be told. I had a baby girl. Masihi’s granddaughter.”

  I couldn’t find anything to say. Christine looked away, and the sound with which she began her next sentence was like the expulsion of breath from a woman who has been hit with a blow.

  “She was premature and lived only nineteen days. I barely held her, because she could not breathe without a machine. Her name was Sophie.”

  “Oh, Christine,” I said.

  I remembered the story of abortion she’d fed Henry. That was because the truth was more sacred. It was better to make up a chosen loss like abortion than admit to the unchosen one.

  “Of course, I did not want to talk about it when I first came to Khartoum. My boyfriend said, ‘It’s probably a good thing.’ I didn’t like anyone saying that, Darcy.”

  For a time she bent her head over the sound machine on her hip. She could have been just another Eritrean bending to rub the grit of the Ethiopian turmoil out of her eye. What intrigued me at that second was the stray suspicion that she had followed her father’s pattern. Maybe an unguarded, callow sentence from Madame Malmédy—a sentence not unlike the one the boyfriend had spoken—had provoked Masihi’s flight. I reached out and caressed her wrist.

  From one side I heard Amna’s clipped enunciation. “I should say goodbye for now.”

  I couldn’t believe what I had heard. Without foundation, I’d thought I would go on having unlimited conversations with Amna, in bunkers and under artillery barrages, about tyranny’s face.

  “I have to visit other friends in the field,” she said with a languid, apologetic smile.

  As I shook hands with her, I considered trying the intimacies of shoulder-grinding, but I realized you had to be in the club for that, as you needed to be for intimacies of any level.

  “Please take care of yourself,” she said. “And eat more injera than you do.”

  I watched her say goodbye to the others and then move away with a column of infantry, chatting with a fairly grizzled-looking man in a flak jacket and long khaki trousers, probably an officer. He seemed delighted to be talking to her, and I wondered if she had some sort of stature, a legendary status, among them. But if she was visiting friends “in the field,” why was she walking toward the trenches with the infantry?

  I heard Christine laughing, a reasonable, knowing, sisterly laugh. “Never mind,” she told me gently. “I am still here.”

  That night, out of loneliness, I completed the notes I’d taken from Amna’s account of her imprisonment.

  After some two weeks of interrogation, she was taken from her cell in the stables and put in a large room in the cavalry barracks. Once there had been glass windows in place here—it may well have been the officers’ mess. Now there were only bars and both the rich sunlight and the insidious mountain cold could penetrate. Here Amna met an extraordinary woman named Kidanu, a woman of perhaps thirty-eight or so who had, under the Emperor, taught Amharic at Asmara University.

  “Kidanu made us all feel fortunate women.”

  Among the prisoners was a girl of eighteen years, a farmer’s wife, pregnant. She had been carrying a liter of kerosene back to her village from Asmara. After all, the hills had been stripped of wood and there was no
electricity in the villages. They arrested her as a fire-raiser, an arsonist, an incendiarist. She had received five years before a military court. She was the sort of woman, said Amna, whom Kidanu could cause to feel elected, exalted and lucky.

  Not totally lucky, however, since she was soon to give birth.

  By the rules, each prisoner had two widths of tile to lie on. This principle had been so long established in the communal cell that Amna did not know whether it had been decreed by the prison authorities or by Kidanu. For when you went into a shared cell you fell among strangers, each with her stench of misery, wearing her remnants of street clothes stained with puke and dust. Some of them had nails missing from one hand or cigarette burns across the napes of their necks. You wondered whether any of them would have cause to make room for you. And you were calmed by the news that they would. There were two widths, and that was inviolate. You could make that part of your world picture. As Africa had two seasons, drought and rain, you had two tiles.

  As the farmer’s wife swelled, however, Kidanu went quietly among those in the cell whom she knew to be politicals and not just hapless toters of kerosene. The girl carried the future of Eritrea in her belly, Kidanu argued. Kidanu talked three of the prisoners into occupying a mere five tiles between them.

  There were further aspects to this model state of a cell as run by Kidanu. If one prisoner’s relatives were wealthy enough to bribe the guards and ensure their beloved received food, another prisoner’s relatives were not. Kidanu established without apparent force a sharing of food.

  To judge by Amna’s account, there, in the midst of the Gebi interrogation center, the perfect sisterly community asserted itself. Everyone there knew that they were being transformed, and were fortified to face the knout and the cigarette ends and the electrical terminals, which again, she kept insisting and almost complaining, she herself, Amna, was not subjected to.

  Again, I had been able to see, during our conversations, the fine line of her collarbone inside her blouse, and it did seem unlikely that anyone who had been worked over by the torturers could emerge so perfectly. Her elegance, the way she moved most of the time, seemed to bear out her claim that the bastinado was the extent of what she had suffered.