The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  Clay stopped singing and said to me, “That is your brother.”

  The pain was so intense that I said in my irritation, “He’s not my brother.”

  “Greet him,” Clay ordered me, “because today he is.”

  The men of the Yellow Clay were all around me, letting my blood stain them, embracing me by the shoulders and even pulling my hair. I was helped towards the fire and permitted to sit as one of them wrapped skin around my wound, and it was clear that I could acknowledge the wound now and gasp with pain if I chose. They returned to the men they had killed then and sang songs to soothe their spirits and wrapped them in their skins to preserve them for collection by their relatives. And then we all set out, my brother for the day helping me along in view of the damage he had done me, the wound for which he felt no remorse. One of the party had run ahead, and as we drew near a little upland I saw fires burning and the hearths of people and, on a neighboring blunt, low hill, the entirety of the other warring group, the Brown Ocher men. Both aggrieved parties hunted each other not here, by their firesides or their home grounds, but in the forests and the plains, and up and down and around other hills than these ones.

  People from those home sites came running to greet me. I now began to understand that at the same time I was and was not the young man whose death had begun this spate of killing, and that the Earless Lizard Hero had wanted it to end now, and somehow my appearance had signaled an end to all the bloodshed. And the part of me that was Shade, the me who had been harried into this journey by the elder, Clay, half-crazed from the wound, felt both close to and very distant from this scene of greeting and rejoicing. I was the returned man whose name I did not even know but whose soul was somehow in me. And so I was caressed by aunts and a mother, and I spoke in my own language which seemed to delight them, for I had traveled after all into death and back again, and they seemed to think it was normal that my words should be skewed. My brother was weeping and shouting and receiving congratulations. There were people of Yellow and Brown Ocher crowding in around me, for my appearance had allayed the war and meant there would be no more wounds. If the families of the two dead men Clay and I had come upon earlier were grieving and wailing and punishing themselves, I did not see them.

  Accompanied by her noisy aunts, a young woman was pushed forward. I noticed her colored headband first, and its woven-in feathers from the great-footed birds. She raised her face and gave me a long-lipped smile and I saw she was very beautiful. They could see I was stunned by her, and laughed and cheered.

  “Your wife, you idiot!” Clay hissed at me.

  The beautiful young woman opened the skins that protected her from the cold and took me in against her breasts. My wound sang in a sort of joyous complaint and there was more rejoicing and howls and animal noises and laughter.

  I was given some thorngum to chew because of the wound and made warm with skins and forgot pain and my particular whiteness as I sat with my—his—young wife and saw dancing and heard song and was fed bounder haunch seasoned with leaves. The air of the place, the thorngum, and the woman in the headband delighted me. Her eyes were startling and the way they moved was also striking. They skittered like a bird, but when they settled they filled up with a meaning that, even if I could not understand it, was visible to me as an entire joy. I was ardent for her, and at last, when the feast ended, she led me to her hut and I found myself holding her, wonderfully strange as she was. Outside, the night creaked with cold, and the grass and the marshes froze and the silence of the air was relieved only by the sound of the last conversations and short protests by restless babies. She wiped the white clay from my face and rediscovered the features of her husband there. I wasted myself away recklessly over and over to this splendid young widow. I gave the second sign of a man returned from death. In the clearing I had proven I could bleed, and now I proved that I could couple with a woman. And that shown, I fell asleep, blood-warm, enclasped.

  Clay woke me in blackness. “We have to go,” he hissed at me as if I should have known it without being told.

  I saw the truth. She would see my being there as a visit, a kindly event, a sign that I—he—was fully a man of both that other world and of this, that no more blood need be paid to make sure that he had reached the sky, and was of such power and contentment there that he had somehow acquired the power for one merciful, peacemaking return. I was a party to a divine deceit.

  Somehow I extricated myself from the man’s young wife without waking her, leaving her sleeping on like a child.

  Once outside, Clay and I headed Morningside.

  “You’ll need to get that ocher off,” he grumbled, as if I had put it on out of childish vanity.

  This adventure in an unknown place filled me for a time with rancor against Clay, the man I could not tempt into friendly exchanges. But now I wonder if it was not a part of manhood, to be made to survive journeys in which one was a tool of the Heroes. To which one was driven by the scathing tongues of our elders.

  And the wound? I never felt it. It never dragged at my leg, and but for the scars it made, I would have believed it a dream.

  Welcoming the Camel

  EVEN BEFORE TED’S death, I had returned to Eritrea to make another documentary, this time about the war and the sort of society the Eritreans seemed to be forming. It had been commissioned and fully funded as an Australian and British coproduction. The film company was supplying a crew and equipment. My relationship with the cameraman was to be somewhat similar to the one I’d had with Andy long before: I would shoot my own footage, and so would he, though I was director of the overall film.

  Drawn by Ted and my stories, along with Ted’s barely scientific suspicion that the Eritreans might be reacting to a surge in the human brain, Cath wanted to come to Eritrea with me. By that stage Ted had traveled to Eritrea once more to visit Freselam and the teams and make plans for the lens facility. Cath and I measured up the perils, including the risks of orphaning our daughters. We consulted them. And then—rightly or wrongly, and with their blessing, and faith in Eritrean protection—we went. Underneath our motives lay the Ted-implanted suspicion we might be visiting something transcendent, a shift in the human tale. The bold surmise! Was I amongst the new humans here?

  The ongoing war revealed itself in Orotta in the bloodless faces of young boys and girls taken down or partially dismembered by a variety of weaponry including 88-millimeter guns. In the women who gave premature birth from shock during extreme bombardments, and their slivers of babies who might or might not become viable. In the amputees and those whose faces were slashed off. In the somnolent malaria sufferers, and the smiling orphans without any arms or legs. In the unexploded cluster bombs Mengistu denied using.

  After leaving Orotta, we made for the newly captured town of Afabet, which was further than a person could have got when I first came to Eritrea at Ted’s urging. On the way our truck broke down near what had been the frontline town of Nacfa, where every house was ruined and tumbled by bombing and artillery. We spent two nights in this town, living in a deep bunker, sharing its rear sleeping chamber with the camera crew. Stacey, the cameraman, was at the far end; Cath nearest the door; the rest of us in between. Lying behind Cath’s head was a pile of cluster bomb fragments that Cath had collected with the intention of taking them home to give to a particular senator who could, in turn, show them to Mengistu’s foreign minister when that official visited Canberra. They seemed emblematic of Cath’s resolve, in this chamber where none of us could get to sleep after discussing the journey thus far, the shock of it, all the medical skills of Orotta.

  Cath and I had the capacity, as if to seal our suspicions about events, for a deeper discourse, the comfort of caresses. But we could not engage in them in the crowded bunker, given that the camera crew was around us, and our Eritrean minders, drivers, soldiers on the move were occupying the front chamber.

  The second night, however, I suggested to Cath that we might meet outside on the ridgeline behind the bunker. I
nside the door one could get water in a basin from a standpipe, and I would wash there and then go out into the night. Cath was to follow and if asked by anyone—our Eritrean minders, for example—she would say she was going out for night air. Such a pronouncement would guarantee none of the Eritrean gentlemen of the bunker would go outside, and would yield up as a courtesy to Cath the entire East African night. If they noticed that this coincided with my absence, as far as I was concerned they were entitled to draw their conclusions. I trusted the crew and our escorts not to sneer. They were not callow adolescents.

  Cath met me. The air was silken but the question was, what ground would accommodate us in these granite mountains? Hard earth had, however, been Adam’s bed, and I was willing for it to be mine.

  We kissed at the crater lip, but this couldn’t be our place, for it was used as a cloaca by everyone, and only the turd-desiccating sun saved it from being odious. I suggested the ridge. We rose up hand in hand, stopping now and then to kiss and brush our hands across each other. When we got to the top, I unbuttoned her shirt while she unbuttoned mine and I held her breasts. On top of this ridge in the highlands we were merely half-clean and yet desired each other’s rankness. And it was accomplished painlessly, the descent to the bed of rubble, for the soft surfaces of the beloved were enough to make the universe itself soft. We were far advanced on our congress or consolation when an extraordinary intervention occurred. Over Cath’s shoulder I saw a huge, fawn, moonlit leg bear into sight, and became aware that a camel had blundered up beside us, our place, and begun eating the flowers on the cactus that grew along the ridge. I saw the prehensile, cunning lips avoid the thorns and capture the blossoms. By now Cath had seen this arrival, this third party in our selected space. We paused and weighed up our new neighbor. Of course, there was laughter, but tears as well. And amazement, as if the presence of the camel cast a meaning we could not fathom over the event. In the Garden of Eden the serpent had cast a shadow, and I instinctively wondered what a camel’s shadow might mean.

  After we’d paused in our caresses, it became apparent that whatever we did to get rid of it, including the throwing of a stone by the bare-breasted Cath, we would not impact the camel’s appetite for nearby cactus flowers. On the one hand the beast was very much present, but on the other the cactus flowers blotted out its attention to all other matters in the universe. And so in that huge beast’s presence, beneath the shadow of its great haunches and knee knuckles, hearing its persistent snuffling and chewing, we continued with our grand commerce. Only when we were done, triumphant at our success on that stony earth, and saw that the camel was still harvesting the flowers in his casual, subtle manner, did we understand the absurdity of the scene.

  I will be taking the memory of that camel with me into the dark. And when Cath goes, no one will be left to use the phrase we garnered from the experience. Welcoming the camel.

  * * *

  We were buoyant for the ride to Afabet at midnight. The Eritreans, the people on whom the world had turned its back, had fought at Afabet the biggest battle since El Alamein in World War II, and driven their enemy back seventy kilometers; seventy kilometers closer to the end of the war the world would not settle.

  We were to be the first outsiders to go to the newly captured town. As we traveled, hard and lovely mountains flanked us and a stony river intervened, noisy with the reverberation of river boulders on the chassis. It was the merest stain of dawn when after three hours our trucks, rolling across the stony plain amongst the highland trees, came to the first houses and overrun trenches of Afabet. Daniel, our guide, shouted over the sound of the harsh road, “Four Russians killed here. Four!” According to what the rebels said, the Russians always got away. Not this time. Four Russians were the index of the sudden victory, as were the ten thousand hapless Ethiopian boys who had died here for Mengistu’s regime. “And one of the Ethiopian generals—he escapes from here all the way to Asmara to explain the defeat, and Mengistu kills him. Execution. Finito!”

  The Eritreans had endured a terrible human toll—more than two thousand dead, and ignored by the press of the world. That such a slaughter had occurred during a three-day battle did not rate as big a mention as a small plane crash in Europe or the Americas. Well, we would make our documentary and put a dent in that massed ignorance.

  When we reached what had been the general’s residence, Daniel said, “There is an American-style stand-up toilet in there. You can relieve yourself in the American way.”

  But when we went in to look for it, snapping on our flashlights and then finding out that the electricity was still connected in the house, and next turning lights on, we saw a conventional Western toilet, its bowl clearly shattered by sledgehammers and its seat attached by an artful nest of barbed wire to its lower porcelain, so that it could not be used. It resembled, in its strange broken symmetries and deftness, some whimsical but elusive piece of art installation. The high school–age conscripts from three divisions of Mengistu’s army had been dying in unutterable anguish as engineers fulfilled the orders of the commander, one Getaneh Haile, and went to work to make a nest of barbed wire for the toilet. The general, having urinated, had then gone to fight his way out to the Ethiopian garrison at Keren in a small convoy of armored cars, and on to the capital, where he had been executed. But he had denied the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and its friends the use of this wonder of plumbing. We walked around the artifact and laughed in hacking disbelief. That this was on his mind!

  What did this say of Ted’s hopeful surmise that something magnificent was about to happen to human brains? That the colonel was able to shrink his attention from the military catastrophe to this bit of porcelain mocked the idea and declared we were deeply implanted in folly and unreason. In our laughter was an awe at the scale of his stupidity. I would dream of the camel and the ridiculous colonel. And of slaughter.

  * * *

  After we left the Ethiopian highlands, back in Port Sudan we found there was no transport out of the city, for Air Sudan was on strike, and road movement to Khartoum was frozen. Sudanese soldiers were massed around every roadblock in and out of the city to keep the citizenry and any aliens within the limits. So, we were back amongst the fallen, the human race as it was accustomed to be. And it was still the month of Ramadan as well. In the West, people at Christmas put off thinking and reacting in favor of gift-giving and sumptuously stocked tables and bars. In the Sudan, they had put off thinking and reacting in favor of the yearly duty of penance. Leaving our Eritrean guesthouse, Stacey and I were dropped into town to visit a man who chartered aircraft. The man told us he could not organize a chartered flight until the day after Ramadan ended in ten days’ time. Eid al-Fitr, they called the day of celebration. Planes were at the moment very much in demand because of the Air Sudan strike, and it would cost $4,000 in American dollars—currency or traveler’s checks—to get us to Khartoum. I said I was not sure I had that amount—in fact I knew I would have to go back to the guesthouse and count. Credit cards? we offered. No. These things are not working at the moment, he explained. The politics, he told me. Banks had been ordered to suspend business. Perhaps with wisdom greater than mine, he spoke of politics as if it were a weather front. The eternal verities, God and finance, would reassert themselves after the storm of politics.

  Back in the Eritrean guesthouse I found we had the required amount. Cath and I went back to the charter office, and a man, tired from doing the night vigils of Ramadan in the mosque, organized our transport.

  On the morning of the Eid al-Fitr celebration the streets around the guesthouse were full of children in bright fabrics and giddy in celebration. Amongst them, the charter plane company man approached the guesthouse’s gate wearing a brilliant violet jellabiya and accepted our combined currency and told us the plane would come from Khartoum for us at nine the following morning.

  We reconnoitered the airport that afternoon. Nomads were camped on the edge of the apron and seabirds had made nests on the light post
s. Camels stood arse-end to us on the tarmac itself, foraging the cracks for grass.

  At nine the next morning we arrived back at the airport, where a detachment of soldiers, with an air of routine rather than of intimidation, held us at the gate outside the terminal. They kept us there until we heard the hallelujah drone in the air above us and saw a Beechcraft make a pass over the airstrip to chase the camels off.

  The Beechcraft landed through shimmering air, and in that light it seemed to be a two-dimensional thing that came towards us, though when it landed and the engines were cut a hulking Egyptian pilot descended from the cockpit. I was delighted to see he was wearing a formal blue shirt with epaulettes on the shoulders, and a black tie, all of which spoke to him taking his profession seriously, which I preferred pilots to do. He introduced himself to our small group and told us his name was Falit, and I wrung his hand. “We thought we were going to die of old age in Port Sudan, mate,” an earnest Stacey told him. “Pleased to meet you,” said Cath, perhaps the only one of us who was not too grateful. Though she was anxious to get back to Sydney and our daughters, she did not, in her sturdiness, consider this an extremity, a crisis.

  Everything seemed to be turning up roses by way of this man with the epaulettes, though the aircraft was being filled in the least satisfactory way possible. A line of Sudanese men bore aviation fuel to the plane in watering cans with the nozzles off, the fuel having been taken by stopcock from a storage tank whose electric pump was—in the spirit of this republic—on its last legs.

  Refueling thus took forty minutes, during which time we asked our pilot, Falit, questions about what the capital was like now. He looked at our camera gear and said, “Crazy. You won’t need that unless you want to get into trouble. The army is everywhere in the capital!”