The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  It was only as he was about to hang up that I remembered to say, “I’ve never spoken to him when the subject of Learned Man hasn’t come up.”

  But I was aware that I’d failed in my advocacy of him.

  What the Stone Sang Of

  AMONGST THE DISASTERS that abounded in the cursed stone Baldy had entrusted in me, deadly to women, was the misfortune of my son. It tipped the earth towards dark stars, towards the devouring of light by darkness, coming to ruin us with the same energy as that with which the slicer had devoured my son’s face and slit his throat.

  The stone evoked in me an urgency to speak to the ancestors. I wondered, of course, whether such communications would be denied to me as they seemed to have been denied Baldy.

  “It is a bad thing,” I confirmed uselessly to him. “We are in for a bad time.”

  “And daughters,” he sighed. “I have no daughters.”

  “Mine is not with child,” I told him, though I could not be utterly sure, and my daughter was of the age appropriate to have a son or daughter.

  There was nothing much I could think of to do in normal daylight. Just as when the slicer struck and the only thing you could do was perform simple functions like washing and anointing, so now we simply wrapped the omens away with the potent emblems designed to steal at least a little of its own power from that dreadful stone.

  * * *

  When I returned to the Lake, somber and burdened by the idea of the stone, I saw Girly near the fire amongst a knot of potent older women, the wives of councillors. She smiled as if to herself when she saw me. Girly. She was suited to her name. Even as she came to join me, I saw the white painted faces of the bereaved family of a woman who had died giving birth to her first child that morning, and they looked as melancholy and sullen as could be required. They were meeting on the summit of the dunes to the Morningside to try to assess what forces, what curse from envious people, had brought an end to their daughter’s life. She had had such a fearful time of going that it would turn out they meant to burn her and break up her bones so she would travel briskly from the scene of her pain to the full and glorious plain of the spirit. I could have told them exactly who and what had harmed her, but I did not want to spread a general fear. There were already curses flowing in the air before Baldy had brought the stone back. For now only he and I knew that they had been enlarged and given new edge.

  After greeting me, Girly said, smiling fully and honestly, “Our daughter Shrill is with child. She is slight, of course, but well into the path of motherhood. The little soul has occupied her and she feels it moving.”

  I looked at a stone, a normal slab of hard clay, and considered kicking it. In the face of what I knew, and out of fear for our child and her child, not wanting to see Girly make a fast fall from elation to affright, I declared this excellent news. But I knew my daughter had chosen the fatal season to carry a child through. I was annoyed and flustered that this news came now, though I understood I must react with joy.

  * * *

  The evening wind came up, churning the Nightside of the Lake in a way common at that time of the sun’s circuit, the rain time of year. Lovely to see, it foreshadowed night in a way that caused Girly to lean against me, her breasts against my upper arm. But when night came, I did not sleep. And though Girly gave me her consolation, I was barely fit for it. Afterwards my sleep remained light and broken for some hours, and far too heavy at others, lacking in the qualities suitable for sky travel. I was not summoned by that ancestor who had been so concerned in recent time to demand my execution of the Sinner Unnameable.

  Next morning, as soon as I was sure she would be at the fiber workers’ place beyond the main fire site, I went to see Shrill. She was sitting on a great woven mat the women had made of lake grasses, and she was weaving an open-worked bag and conversing with another weaver, a young woman some paces away who was working on a similar bag. It was one of the places where, when the sun grew higher, the older women with weaving skills gathered, but for the moment only these two, more recent to the skills of weaving and dyeing, kept the space lively, persuading their supply of fibers to be compliant in their fingers. Seeing me come, Shrill stood up and pulled a skin cape about her shoulders, beaming at me as broadly as her mother had.

  “A child,” I stated rather than asked, looking as pleased as I could by trying.

  “My husband saw him in the sky, of course, that’s what happened,” she confirmed. “As usual. And planted him in me.”

  “Is it a boy?” I asked, seeking as much comfort as I could.

  “Bass says he dreamed a girl.”

  “The father is sometimes mistaken,” I said, though I had never been wrong. I had seen my two sons and daughter by the base of trees in heaven before I begot them and knew who they were before they came to earth.

  I dropped to my haunches beside Shrill and she went on happily weaving, choosing strands of yellow grass and the Lake wattles, and fibers from the bark of the rough figs which she had dyed with flintwood. The weavers all had bladders of flintwood sap and dyed the fiber with it. I watched as her quick fingers wove wattles together and reached for a browner bark strand. She was a gifted maker of fishing nets to catch perch and scoopheads, using her long legs to serve as the frame for the weaving, then wrapping the string around them so that the mesh appeared between them as she leaned forward, working fast and making knots. Around her head was a band she had woven with thunderbird feathers and meshed the feathers of parrots in. It was not a piece for everyday wear. As for her work, there was a women’s reason for varying the strands that I was not privy to.

  “And you are feeling hale?” I asked. “Does the child kick?” I added without waiting for an answer. “Your mother says the child kicks.”

  “Not yet. But it is as if she is waiting to do it. I can feel she has a plan to kick. And I am of a mind with this child. I have seen its face when I’m sleeping and it’s the face of a child planning to kick.”

  I put my hand out to caress her shoulder and laughed with her. For it was always wrong to run counter to her happy disposition. There was something necessary flowing in her that prevented the expectation of sad eventualities, and it should not be quarreled with.

  “You’ve told your aunt Scales?” I asked. Scales, elder sister of Girly, was a fortress of a woman, and might, by her good influence or her singing, be a fortress here against that foul stone.

  “I told her first,” Shrill asserted—and it was correct that she should have told Girly’s eldest sister. For the child’s totem would be that of Aunt Scales and the child’s earliest instruction would come from that woman.

  After that sweet conversation, though bitter to me since I’d had to pretend, I got up and said goodbye like a man without care and returned to the fire outside my hut, where Girly tossed tubers about on the coals with the fire-hardened fingertips our women had from their trading with fire. So too from dealing with the hot stones they built from the clay of termite nests, clay that drank in heat and was turned to stone by it, and thus made a hearth.

  I crouched by her. She was cooking thin yams and green bulbs with mashed scarlet fruit. “I must go out again,” I announced. “Away. On my own.”

  Girly’s staring at the yams was as good as words. It said I was rejecting the bounty she was preparing.

  “I’ll take a skin of water,” I assured her, as if that was the question.

  “But you’re just home. You’re always going off,” she complained at last, picking up a small yam and throwing it at my legs. It made a brief, fiery scald there.

  “It must be done. It is work that must be done.” I adopted an air of authority that would have persuaded any councillor but would not persuade Girly.

  “Is there a camp of strangers out there, of Upper Waters women? With cunts of quartz to slice your pricks off. And you rush to them, as stupid men do!”

  “You know it is not a matter of women,” I assured her so wearily that she seemed to believe me.

  “
Take your skins, then, you fool. You know it will be cold without me.”

  “Of course,” I agreed. “Certainly I will. But I must go.”

  “It’s the child,” I could have told her.

  “Madness,” Girly decided. “What it is you have in your head I would like to know. It’s always there. You are always miles off.”

  I couldn’t argue with her. “I am in the wrong place for dreams,” I said then, not sure what I could safely tell her. “There is no dream path here anymore. It has moved on. I have to find it because I must dream for my own good and yours.”

  “And you talk to an ancestor,” she complained, “and he gives you tasks he doesn’t give others. And of course you do them to the limit. I wish it was some stony-cunted woman you were with! That would be easier for us all.” She pushed the fruits and yams around the cooking stone. “I could beat all the stone out of her! But this … ?” She shrugged.

  Girly was not happy.

  Saving Lenses with Gracie

  THE NEWS CAME into our living rooms in June 2000 that Ethiopia was in the overnight process of reinvading Eritrea. The border towns and fields were falling quickly to the Ethiopian army. Issayas’s fellow old campaigner from the days when the Tigreans were also fighting Mengistu, Negasso—now the president of Ethiopia—claimed there had been offensive border activism by Issayas’s troops and that, by the way, those Eritrean border provinces, Adi Quala and Senafe, were traditionally Ethiopia’s.

  The inescapable truth was that the Ethiopians were only about three hours’ drive from Asmara, where Ted’s lens facility was still producing optical lenses to European standards but selling them to the world for $7. If the Ethiopian army got to Asmara, the children of light, the children of the possible new moral evolution, would be defeated and Ted’s lens plant would be destroyed.

  At 9 a.m. on the day of waking to the news, I called the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and spoke to a young official. Did the foreign minister know that the lens plant would be destroyed if the capital fell? Unless we used our diplomatic influence to let the Ethiopians know we considered it holy ground.

  The official consoled me, as if I were the only one stricken with an eccentric conviction. He would pass on my concerns and telephone number to the minister. I could tell no one in government was galvanized, however, by the peril to Ted’s lens workshop and I was unlikely to hear back from Canberra.

  Regardless, I vowed that any destruction of the lens factory must not happen unobserved and that I must go to Asmara to document it. It had been paid for, after all, by us. By Australia. And it was part of Ted’s legacy, and the tasks he had imposed had not ended with his death. I’m not sure whether it was Ted’s rowdy spirit or a sharp memory of his pronouncements that was uppermost in my desire to protect and record. But I was not driven to win his posthumous approval. I was outraged about what might happen to the lens factory on my own account, and that of the Eritreans.

  I spoke to Cath. She herself felt passionate but was limping and due to have a knee operation in three weeks. She expressed no doubt about me going to Eritrea if I chose to. The idea of Ted’s lens plant being destroyed provoked a sort of familial courage or recklessness in us, and later that morning I received a call from Gracie, who’d recently graduated from the Australian Film and Television School. Cath and I had infected our children with regard for the image and for writing, even though I myself had been skeptical of the limits of both.

  “I’m going to go and film what happens,” Gracie said.

  “You don’t have to. I’m going. Just to shoot footage.”

  But in our ensuing conversation Gracie could not be argued out of her intentions, and I knew at her age I had been the same. I could understand this story might sing to her as the desert Aboriginal strike of long past had called to me.

  Gracie and I made preparation to travel with our lightweight digital movie cameras. We were not primarily making a film. (Though a cynic might ask, “When weren’t we?”) We were to be witnesses. If Ethiopian soldiers retook Asmara, we hoped to inhibit them. And if we couldn’t inhibit, we would provide the evidence of the crime. The idea that our cameras were God’s eye in a naughty world was a temporary illusion of mine that had not fully survived Vietnam. It could be as misleading as the hands that wielded it. It also had an anodyne edge to it—in provoking outrage, it sometimes sedated it. There was a distance to it, as well. Even close-up could be, to the viewer, far away. But it was the only medium of protest I had.

  Getting to Asmara presented us with problems. We couldn’t go by way of Addis Ababa, for it was the enemy capital in this circumstance. Gracie, who wanted to be a producer and had her mother’s practical skills, was energetic when it came to itineraries. She connived with the Eritrean ambassador in Canberra, and between them they worked out that we must first go to Cairo, where one of our old Eritrean guides would greet us, and then on to Sena in the Yemen, and next by Yemeni Air to Khartoum and so into Asmara at night. The pilots of Yemeni Air were robust souls, it seemed, ready to land in the less bomber-prone Eritrean evening.

  So we had a pilgrimage on our hands, but we had expected to, and in the last months of my middle age I was content with that. I was not so pleased that Gracie was coming too, but I knew if I pulled out she would still go. Cath had faith that nothing bad could happen to me or Gracie whatever the peril, if the Eritreans were meeting us everywhere and conducting us.

  We landed amongst splendid bare mountains in Sana’a, in the shadow of the old town of brown mud-brick, under splendid biblical mountains. Beneath another mountain, forty kilometers from Asmara, the Eritreans had flanked and halted the Ethiopian army on its till-then victorious path to Massawa. The stated casualties, fifty thousand wounded and twenty thousand dead, their number floated above the dishes of abundance, lamb and saltah stew and laxoox bread, brought tears to my eyelids. But who was I to weep at the relentless pity of it, after all the other relentless pity.

  The Yemeni flight to Khartoum and Asmara was piloted by a tubby man with a full, rich prophet’s beard. The flight was full of elegant young Eritreans from the US and Europe, all of them English speakers, who thanked us for going back with them. If Asmara was to fall, they said, they wanted to be there as witnesses and voices. So their motivation matched ours. They knew Ted’s name and a few knew mine, and we were bound in a selfless fraternity. For these young people who had escaped the dismal statistics of the Horn by going to Europe or the New World had felt bound to return from profitable professions to stand before their cherished city. They were traveling in the only aircraft going there, and the sternness of their intention compensated for the fact there were not safety belts for all of the seats.

  The city did not seem to be considered doomed by the young Eritreans aboard. As we spotted the lights of Asmara, permitted to shine for now by the lack of Ethiopian aircraft on the radar, our fellow travelers, unconstrained by seatbelts, began to dance in the aisles and were still dancing when we hit the airstrip, their knees buckling a little in the fraternal ecstasy of arrival.

  We were met by two protocol officers, Ghebrehewit and Habtom. Of course, I knew Ghebrehewit from Ted’s days. Our faces shone, theirs shone too, almost—I thought—as if we were some old-fashioned form of relief column. They asked after Cath, whom they had also met in the field, they said. In the old days. They had been fighters then, but bureaucrats now—their shirt collars were crisp. They had none of the edginess one might have expected in citizens of a city about to fall to a brutal enemy. They took us to the Ambasoira Hotel, where Cath and I had stayed when we last visited Asmara, in the hopeful days of independence. “We will show you Dr. Ted’s eye facility first thing in the morning so that you can film as much of it as you like,” said the one named Habtom.

  “How far away are the Ethiopians?” I asked.

  “They are held for now,” said Habtom with a frown. “We are waiting for them to try again.”

  Gracie told me she slept profoundly that night. Dreamlessly
. But she and I were still thick in the head when we approached the lens facility. We were met in the vestibule by a tall bald chemist, who led us past the display cases of plastic lens containers, Ted’s face on each. He showed us the latest certifications, framed in a corridor, that the laboratory had been granted. “We are certified to European standards,” he told us. “Of course, the Ethiopians aren’t buying any at the moment. But elsewhere in Africa …”

  He seemed as serene about the chance of invasion as the men had been last night. Had I been demented to get so passionate in front of my TV in Sydney? I asked him, as if for verification, “Are you worried the Ethiopians will destroy the lab if they take Asmara?”

  He expressed his breath in a sage, measured way. “If they do not know what the place means, it might stand more of a chance,” he said. “But if they know what it means to us …”

  I looked at my daughter; she had just seen evidence of Eritrean poise.

  We filmed the laminar flow sterilization rooms into which we could look by way of mirrors. Beyond the glass, men and women wearing blue coats, masks, goggles, gloves, and plastic hairnets worked at microscopes or weighed materials for the plastic formulation for the lenses and their little filaments and armatures. The idea that if the city fell they might be hauled forth and shot, or else shot in their laboratories, did not seem to possess or delay them in their search for exact formulations and the minuscule smoothness required in lenses. In the various labs, they spun bottles of chemicals in separator machines, vouchsafed trays of lenses to autoclaves, inspected each lens individually, then loaded them en masse into the containers that carried Ted’s face. It was marvelous and it was noble and of course it was a manufacturing of light. But darkness was on its way.

  In the afternoon, we chatted with men in the coffee shops the Italians had left in Asmara during the occupation that ended with World War II. No air-raid siren wailed. Perhaps this afternoon’s pilots feared the same anti-aircraft guns I had seen firing on an Ethiopian bomber some years back. And now the Eritreans had their own fighter-bombers guarding the city, though there could not have been many of them. We had spotted their bunkers at the airport the night before.