Within a half hour everyone had abandoned the riverbed since, apart from the issue of bombers, what had been deliciously cool at dawn had already become a furnace. Ted and I were amongst the last to withdraw to the trees under the sting of the heat, and there we found a food dump, with young Eritreans of Tesfai’s organization in charge, and a hut in which Ted and Fram supervised nurses as they put lenses into the eyes of Hadarab men and women. As I filmed, I was struck by the composure of the patients, the comfortable smiles they wore as they entered the tent where, after all, someone was going to cut into their eyes. I mentioned this to Fram during a pause in the work.
“They do not get nervous like Western people,” he told me. “They need no preoperative treatment.”
When the operating was over, the surgical team seemed to vanish, and Fram told me they were visiting friends nearby, as if this forest were full of cadres of old chums from the rebel medical corps.
That night we went back up into the cooler Highlands again, reaching the guesthouse in the small hours. There had been a lot of excited speech in the truck—the Eritreans had fought their way down the terraces of the Rift Valley and across coastal plains and along the railway viaducts, to threaten the port of Massawa, occupied by Mengistu’s troops. An ancient town, the Italians had filled Massawa with their architecture as they had supposedly filled Asmara.
It turned out that the Eritreans had made a nifty attack on Massawa, outflanking it by land and sea, raging down the coast in motorboats—showing all the Eritrean inventiveness we took for granted.
After taking the brief comfort of a slug of gin, we took to our beds.
I was woken at about 7 a.m. by loud voices, specifically Ted’s. Getting up, I went to see what was driving him to such a volume and found him haranguing—or to the ignorant it would seem so—Ghebrehewit, our guide.
“But didn’t they think of waking me and checking with me?” Ted fumed, to which Ghebrehewit mumbled apologetically.
Ted saw me arrive but kept his gaze—and frustration—focused on our guide. “You know how much it cost to train that little bastard? And not in money, in time above all! In expertise!”
Ghebrehewit gave an unabashed shrug, very Italianate, as if there’d been some exchange of habits of gesture between the old colonial masters and the Eritreans.
“And we’re in the middle of training the cataract squads,” Ted protested, casting his eyes up to whatever gods anarcho-syndicalists had. “Bugger me! I didn’t think the little prick would do this.”
Now he turned to me. “That little shit Fram has cleared out to Massawa. He left me a note, but he knew I wouldn’t let him go if he’d woken me.”
“There are casualties there,” said Ghebrehewit in doleful apology.
“Two of his young mates from the hospital here called by in the small hours and they all cleared out in the truck. To operate on battle casualties!” Ted shouted at me. “That prick Mengistu is going to bomb Massawa, you can bet! And there, in the midst of it, is our Fram, as likely to be killed as any other bastard. This country’s single eye doctor! Due to run the programs and the lens manufacturing!”
Ted looked hollow-faced. I understand it now. He was dying. And if Fram was killed, when would another anarcho-syndicalist come along and train another Fram to replace him?
Ghebrehewit murmured, “He told me to say he would be back Thursday night, even if he has to steal a truck to get here.”
But to Ted it just wasn’t good enough.
At breakfast, which consisted only of black tea for Ted that morning, I tried to console him. “Look, Ted, consider it from Fram’s point of view. The Eritreans have been through murder and bombing and shit for a quarter of a century. And throughout it they dream of two places—Asmara, the capital, and Massawa, their key to the Red Sea. And now they believe they’re going to take Massawa. Of course Fram would accept an invitation to go down there. He shouldn’t have, but it’s understandable he would.”
Ted shook his head and said in sorrow rather than fury, “I’d expect you to say something stupid like that. As if Fram’s an adolescent. He is a man of fucking thirty-two. Thirty-two!” The number was supposed to rout me. “Don’t you put this in your bloody film!”
Over the next three days Ted went on giving his classes to the cataract squads, operating most of those nights as well. His anger at Fram seemed to energize him. When we got back to the guesthouse after midnight on Thursday, we saw a truck in one of the camouflaged bays, a wreck of a thing with a scorched back door and bullet holes along its length. We walked inside the guesthouse, where Fram was drinking tea at the table.
“Did you get bloody shot at?” Ted asked.
“No, Ted,” said Fram carefully, laying down his words like arduously chosen cards. “They just gave me that old wreck to get home in.”
“To get home,” Ted said, and made a dubious sound with his teeth. “How bloody dare you, Fram.”
Fram lowered his head with some dignity, but inviting his punishment.
“Just in dinners we fed you, you little prick! Just in the dinners we fed you, Danny and me, you had no bloody right!”
Fram nodded, acknowledging the argument.
“As for irreplaceable knowledge … You have it but it’s not for your own sake, it’s for the plan. It’s even for more than Eritrea. It’s for the world. And you dare bugger off with it and risk being killed in Massawa!”
After Ted walked out of the room, presumably to collapse now that his anger was vented, Fram raised his head and greeted me with a nod, saying, “He is right in his view. But perhaps I was right in mine. Will you tell Ted I am very repentant?”
“What was it like?” I asked.
“You know,” he said, “shrapnel is merciless.”
I was grateful I didn’t quite know how merciless it was.
* * *
The documentary concerning Ted and Freselam in Eritrea did not contain Ted’s fascinating suspicion that the Eritreans might be the first version of a new kind of human. It concerned human blindness, but also the blindness of the world to the war raging in Eritrea, still largely unreported. World leaders did not step forward to end the conflict. They had their reasons, which we were powerless against. But it worked adequately in terms of marshaling support for Ted’s plans for cataract teams and lens factories.
Ted would make two further journeys to Eritrea, but then his decline became more severe. At his house in Sydney crowds of visitors gathered—old Marxists, boxers, footballers, and other patients, along with Nepalese doctors he had made plans with, Vietnamese surgeons, Aboriginals he had treated, and a few senators who had a passion for Eritrea. They represented his global project. So did the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, from whom he demanded “no-bullshit” promises that whoever won the next election would establish a lens facility in Eritrea to be run by Fram and the Eritreans.
One bright winter morning, before seeing the Eritreans win their struggle, Ted died. A journalist rang me to tell me and I choked on tears of disbelief.
Saving the Ocher People
IT WAS HARD for me to face that long ago—under the direction of an elder, Clay—I had helped other people quite casually—at least, that was how I thought of it, even if I had been deprived of blood in the cause. It was about the time the woman who would become my first wife had begun to enchant me by her quiet means. For the right woman the ways of meekness can be as alluring as the ways of display, loudness, teasing, flaunting, and mockery. If at that stage I thought about journeys, it was a journey towards Morningside, where, amongst peaks, stood great crystal snakes of ice with faces taller than trees. One could imagine the wonder of being in such places. But after my trial in the wasteland, I was happy to stay at the center of the dreamed-forth earth. The country of the Lake. I knew that in the country up sunwards there were people who found, amidst their fields of clay, the most intense stones, almost too dense to be worked into useful knives or devices. We did not envy these people, however. Nor d
id we envy the Nightsiders, who had their marshes and forests and variety of ochers but no great fields of kindly water as we possessed.
One morning of particular frost, that elder of unceremonious words, Clay, found me by the fire of my Vanished Mother, who still breathed and fussed over me then and doubted if there was one amongst the young women fit for me. Clay was polite to her in a way unfamiliar to me. He asked could he speak to me, her son, briefly.
When I gathered my skins about me and joined him some paces away from my mother’s fire, he looked at me full-on and scratched the corners of his mouth as if he had no idea of what to do with me.
“I met my ancestor,” he told me. “I traveled …” He made a bowl of his hand and then raised it briefly, nearly negligently, skywards. His Hero was Earless Lizard. “He told me that the people in the Ocher country, the Nightsiders, live in a state of warfare and murder. I did not know that. My feeling well might be, ‘Let them.’ But the Hero has a better soul than mine and thus is the Hero. I said, ‘These aren’t my people.’ It took some cheek on my part to say that. But I did, being a sensible man. And he said, ‘Many of them are mine.’ ”
As Clay looked at me intently, I thought resentfully, If they have nothing to do with you, they certainly have nothing to do with me. I thought he was intending to ask me to accompany him there, that the Hero had asked him to make peace in that country.
But the news was worse than that. “The Hero named you,” said Clay as if disgusted. “You are needed, since a young man like you was murdered at the base of their wars.” He looked meaningfully at me.
“I am not that young man,” I told him.
“I know that,” he rushed to tell me. “But according to the Hero you have that in you that will console them for the man.”
“How do you know that?”
“The Hero told me,” he declared with a measure of distaste for having to explain things to me.
I shook my head in defiance at Clay and his air of disapproval.
Clay said, “Don’t worry. I questioned his choice of you. ‘Him?’ I said. ‘That empty boy?’ But the Hero said, ‘That’s the way of it. Him.’ ”
I was frightened by someone as reticent and scornful as Clay telling me his Hero knew of me, and that I could somehow pacify people I had never met. But to confirm my fears, Clay said, “You have to come with me encased in white clay to make peace over there in the marshes and forests of the Ocher country.”
The idea of traveling with Clay as my sole companion did not appeal to me.
“You can encase yourself in white when we reach the clay pit at the early marshes,” he told me, as if this were a powerful motive for me to consent. “Because they will see you coming even if we don’t see them.”
He spread his hands and said, “It’s what the Hero wants.”
I had no choice, since I knew Clay would not of his own will have chosen me as a man to travel with and a figure of peace amongst these far-off people.
There have been many journeys in my life on the earth, but this was a plain if not a harsh one. We moved out into the flat country beyond the Lakes. Clay was a poor fellow traveler for me and did not try to hide his amazement that his Hero had named me and that his task, as an eminent man, was simply to deliver me to some people his Hero had an interest in. There was no long talk by our campfire at night. Instead Clay would examine the flames as if he had once been capable of reading them but had now reached the sour conclusion he knew nothing. He uttered no best wishes for sleep when we rolled ourselves in our skins.
The earth on our path presented grassland and low stony ridges for two days. On the second of these a great but far-from-clever dome nose traveled some distance off but in our direction, as if influenced by our passage. We lost her amongst a reach of marsh grasses she seemed to relish. We could see she nurtured a young one in her pouch. Thus, even if we’d had time to hunt, she was forbidden to us.
Clay would sometimes say, remembering his conversation with his Hero, “I told him, you can’t mean that big lump. But he said, ‘Him. Yes. He’s the one.’ And I said, ‘But he has no marks of cleverness.’ And he said, ‘Just the same. Him.’ ”
I did not have the authority to lose my temper. Instead I just murmured, “I’m as surprised as you.”
“ ‘That one,’ the Hero told me,” Clay reiterated, as if wanting to press his amazement with other invisible wise presences in the broad night.
We rose on the third morning while it was dark, and wrapped our feet in skins and ran across a wide icy marsh, sometimes breaking the surface. We had run a great way before day broke, and we reached a stony rise beneath red mountains. Ahead of us was a country of trees, which sometimes revealed patches of grassland thick enough to hide entirely what was ahead in a country whose intentions could not readily be seen. We found a white seam of ocher, and Clay told me to take off my skins and cover my scalp, my plant, my back—the latter exercise he helped me in. I was to be all white. I was to let the sun dry the ocher on me and was not permitted to scratch it where it itched me. I was unsure how long I would wear this clay skin and wondered if I would ever be permitted to take it off. In the meantime I wore no skins. Pure white and naked.
Later in the day Clay and I came to a little brown hill of stones on this plain, and I could see women, mothers, grandmothers, looking at us over the small ridge above. They seemed timid and twittered in their form of speech. In our country, where people lived sensible lives, I might have been a figure of amusement in this white clay, a naked curiosity, but to the people beyond I seemed astonishing and something to be puzzled out. In a clearing further on, with a suddenness that horrified me, we came across two dead bodies gory and decorated in brownish ocher. They had that deep unmoving of the dead. They had been stripped of their skins and weapons and were sadly naked. One of them had many spear wounds in his chest and stomach, and lay within a circle of his own squandered blood. This broad patch of dark red made me wary, since I did not know what influence it still contained. The other Brown Ocher man, his chest lined with mourning scars he had inflicted in grief for others, had a broken, bloody skull, and some of the matter inside it had been exposed with a blow from a stonewood club.
Smelling smoke from somewhere, we skirted these corpses and the shadow of their influence and saw a party of five men in yellow ocher at the far side of the open space. They had a fire going to protect them from the dead men and to celebrate the victory they’d had over them. They began to stand as we drew closer and I saw the influence we had upon them, these the winners in the recent conflict. They stared and spoke tersely to us. They had all been comfortably arrayed by the fire, settling themselves to what had happened. Now, for whatever reason, we were all unsettled, them and us.
I heard Clay’s breathing. He had nothing mocking to say. He too seemed bewildered.
As one of these Yellow Ocher men advanced on me, as if to temper the fellow’s behavior, Clay began singing something about this country, a song he had learned at some stage and with which he now armed himself. The man who advanced on me was some years older than me but still much younger than Clay. He was sturdy and his ribs were outlined with yellow ocher and half his face was a mask of yellow. He came forward slowly but with an air of intending to make some judgment on me, head to foot—to test me out in some way. I looked to Clay for a word of comfort, but he went on singing his song as if he were content that it would save him. I could sense I was not a part of his song, and neither its power nor its meaning shaded me from the eyes of this terrible yellow creature.
The friends and fellow killers of the man who approached me called to him in a language that carried a glint of meaning for me, was somewhat like ours at the core but not enough for me to understand. How would the extra skin of ocher I wore protect me from the stonewood club or the spear he carried, a long one with its single glistening head of bounder bone, not as ornate as some of those by the fire which he had carried into the recent fight. This was a spear for impaling, for a
sharp passage through the meat of the body. He addressed me loudly, but I showed him by a gesture of my white hands that I did not know if it was something he wanted me to reply to. There was one other harsh statement from him, though whether addressed to his companions or me or one of his Heroes I could not have said. He repeated himself, his eyes enraged. I spread my hands. I felt stupid, and Clay was still consumed by his song and was giving me no help.
The Yellow Ocher man ranged to one side then drew his spear back and drove it straight through the ham of my leg so that it entered the outside of the leg and went right through and emerged again, below my penis, and—continuing on—inflicted a shallow wound in the inside of my other leg. The instant it slithered into me so smoothly I knew that I must endure it and not buckle under the scalding wound. Everything he had said suggested by tone that the worst thing would be for me to fall over. He looked at me as if assessing how I had absorbed his spear.
I felt the desire to loosen up my waking mind as he withdrew the spear. I fought the desire to be numb and made sure I remained on my feet, and a gush of blood ran down the whiteness of both my inner and outer leg. Sensing what I was required to do, I stuck my thumb in the wound of my outer leg, as before my eyes the earth spun and then settled.
There was now applause from the men by the fire, and from the man who had driven his spear through me and extracted it. He briefly inspected the threads of my blood and began to chirrup as joyously as a child and came forward and embraced me closely. The other men by the fire were on their way too, clapping hands, raising arms, crying greetings.
The Book of Science and Antiquities Page 13