The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  One of the café dwellers waiting on war anew remarked, “We’re a little short on aviation fuel.”

  Habtom said, a little like a bureaucrat, “Not short, brother. We’re keeping all our reserves for operational flights.”

  Gracie and I were booked to leave on the tortuous route home in eight days, to allow us a few days’ rest back in Sydney before Cath had her knee operation. In my world-spanning anxious jet lag, the fear of not getting back to be with Cath before her operation was combined with the dread of losing Gracie, who was happily filming my discussion with the Asmara café set. For though I had come here to film one thing, the lens facility and its fate, she was up for whatever presented.

  “Doesn’t Eritrea have its own airline now?” I asked. I had heard something about that.

  “Yes,” they said, a 737 chartered from the Russians and piloted by two Russian pilots. But it had stopped flying as soon as the invasion started.

  “Well,” I said, “Gracie and I will just have to go back on Yemeni Air. Whenever it visits again.”

  Habtom said softly, “I am afraid that all international commercial flights have ended for now, until we see what happens.”

  Ghebrehewit declared, “You got in yesterday because of the lull. The lull might last. I hope so.” Yet I had a sense they were editing their words, which they had never done in the old days. Where had the old grandeur and certainty and spaciousness gone?

  Given the lack of activity in the air, Ghebrehewit and Habtom took us on a reconnaissance south of Asmara. Near the town of Mendefera, where Tesfai, the man who had interested Ted in Eritrea the first place, had spent his childhood, we found the first encampment of those who were fleeing the Ethiopians. For the earlier arrivals from the south, some old Unesco tents had been pitched, and a vast supply of plastic basins were laid out like a bazaar in primary colors, all donations from the people in the capital. Nearby were some thousands of families who’d arrived too late for the tents and were living on patches of blue plastic. Men came up, the dust of their flight on foot clogging their jellabiyas, and shook or, more accurately, wrung our hands. Women, who looked to have taken to the road with their coffee-making sets wrapped in cloth and slung on their backs, kept house on these tarpaulins.

  “No aid has come,” said Habtom. “They think the aid will come after you. They see you and they hope the world is taking notice.”

  But only the Apples and ex-pat Eritreans were so far taking notice.

  Children tottered everywhere, with young mothers shawled in bright cloth continually carrying their puking, projectile-shitting infants away from the living areas to try to prevent those areas from being fouled, like the good soldiers of primary hygiene, the doctors of the EPLF, had taught them. But it would not work, and later in the dusk, when we drove to a hill beyond, we could see families still on the way to the impromptu camp.

  A man brought us tepid tea at one stage. “Has this been well boiled?” asked Gracie cheerily, her practical mother’s daughter.

  “At some stage,” says Habtom. For him and Ghebrehewit this was research too, as we moved amidst the blue plastic hearths in this teeming site. Along the banks of a wadi, amongst acacia thorn trees, a wraith of a woman ran screaming. Other women ran after and surrounded her, and she knelt and gouged her cheeks with her nails and anointed the cuts that appeared and the Coptic cross tattoo on her forehead with handfuls of dust. Her friends tried to raise her to her feet again. Gracie moved amongst them, filming, though she did not know exactly what the phenomenon meant. “It is common,” said Ghebrehewit. “Women raped at gunpoint in front of their children.”

  For her, no victory, no gift of tarpaulin and plastic basin and no return home could cancel that savagery. The other women were raising up their sister, caressing her. Gracie shot it with streaks of tears on her cheeks, for knowing by now what it was, she knew it to be yet unspeakable, and a defeat for what a camera could tell you.

  * * *

  At the Ambasoira Hotel, I woke Gracie next morning, in a beautiful teal predawn, and she gathered her gear without complaint for a long drive south to the high front line in the mountains. It was a still dawn. As we drove past, those who had fled the south were just stirring in the refugee cantonments outside Asmara. Women with plastic basins or buckets in their hands were going towards the wadi for water, and men worried over little heaps of kindling, and it all seemed orderly—no women trying to claw their faces off, no young mothers running to intercept children who had lost management of their bowels. By early light, Ghebrehewit and Habtom had brought us up the dirt track that found its way, turning continuously on itself, up the sides of Emba Soira Mountain. They took us as far as you could go in a four-wheel Toyota before boulders blocked our way. At that point, we started out on the high track ourselves. Above us were the emplacements where trained soldiers were busy on the day’s first fatigues. Some were already returning to their positions with jerry cans of water from streams below the mountain. Gracie and I filmed without plan, independently of each other, confident in each other’s discrimination. Meanwhile the silhouettes of those Eritrean troops who had halted the Ethiopian army, at least for now, showed up against a ruthless stone ridge and a brightening sky.

  Near the top of the ridge, short of breath, we entered a rough communication trench and all at once looked down on the Rift Valley, birthplace of humankind, where our mother, and Learned Man’s as well, had lived. From this great altitude the Eritreans had outflanked the Eighth Ethiopian Army, which was trying to reach and reclaim the Red Sea coast. We could see below us, in the great arid declivity, in a majesty of geology and an ignominy of strategy and tactics, the clumps of khaki, like heaps of unclaimed washing. “They still fight like they did when the Russians advised them,” said Ghebrehewit. “The Zhukov principle of overwhelming force.”

  In the trench line that ran along the ridge, a lean Eritrean machine gunner told us he had learned his English from BBC shortwave broadcasts, and claimed he had wept as he had harvested the youth below with his old-fashioned and dented machine gun. The gun’s presence here could have caused more than the user to weep—bought from the Russians by Mengistu or the emperor, captured by the Eritreans, now used to shear away the boy children of Ethiopian hearths. It had been all too unequal, he told us. And though there was a local truce just now, no one had come to carry away the corpses that still reproached us from the floor of the valley. And who counted the numbers of dead on the valley floor, of a failed spring offensive like this? The tears of this machine gunner might be their only sure memorial. Or, to be fanciful, but not too grossly so, of the Eve who begot them all, machine gunners and targets, and who like an Aboriginal ancestor still traveled this grievous valley. But who counted them the way the Australians tried to count the dead of Gallipoli, a military enterprise as hapless as what had occurred here?

  We stayed up there in that high, brown, sharp-edged aerie as the light became frank and full. We interviewed a company commander who had studied economics at Colorado State University, and a woman medic, a somber, reliable young woman with braided hair and the sweet oval face of the region. The soldiers looked so scrubbed. They seemed intelligent citizens, and the dead below, by contrast, were hapless kids Negasso had scoured from the streets and the high schools of Ethiopia.

  On the way down to find the car, Ghebrehewit said, “We have just taken back the town of Tessenai over in the west. It’s been looted and some damage done, but we can go there in a helicopter tomorrow. Would you like to come?”

  “Of course,” said Gracie straight off, and she looked at me and uttered a little stutter of laughter, her eyes glistening beneath her mother’s fringe of hair, but which in her case was brownish, from me. I saw at once that, of course, she was dealing with all of these events in terms of equal seriousness. She had been willing to be an inhibitor and recorder of any damage done to Ted’s place, but apart from that she had documentary ambitions of her own.

  “No, I’ll go, and you can have any footage I
bring back,” I said to her. “But I think you’re better to stay in Asmara.”

  Wisely she decided not to argue with my parental edict and began to discuss the state of the war and the truce we had heard about—was there really one? How reliable was it likely to be?

  Ghebrehewit said, to reassure me, “There might be a general truce signed later today or tomorrow. We can’t be absolutely sure about it.”

  Habtom asserted, “They’ll certainly welcome it. Because of what happened to them on their way to the Red Sea.”

  * * *

  That afternoon a truce was negotiated by the Organization of African Unity. There were celebrations in Asmara in the evening—before going to bed Habtom and Ghebrehewit took us to meet some young Eritreans in a bar in the neighborhood of Kombishtato, and they were exultant, since their nation had survived and Asmara was safe. They were sure the truce would last, that the major ploys of this invasion had been made and negated. But for the first time I heard an urbane young officer arguing that the unfinished business was to expel the city’s ethnic Tigreans, the people once considered allies but who were the same ethnicity as Negasso, the Ethiopian leader. There were posters in the streets calling for them to be rounded up, and on the way home from Emba Soira we had encountered busloads of them being shipped back to the border, to be let loose there.

  Habtom had genial faith in this eviction. “It will be better for them back with Uncle Negasso.”

  “But aren’t their homes in Asmara?” I asked him.

  “Yes, we have been host to them for a long time. But we can’t afford them anymore. It’s bad socially and in terms of security,” Habtom replied. “But it’s bad for them too. There’s a lot of ill will towards them now.”

  “But how much can they take with them on those crammed buses?” I asked.

  “It is sad,” said the judicious Ghebrehewit. “But we did not start this war. Now the International Committee of the Red Cross is in charge of the evacuations, not us. Everything is being done properly. We can arrange an interview with the evacuation official if you wish.”

  The way he said it, it was as if no coercion at all were involved in removing the undesirables. I felt then I had discovered from the lips of Ghebrehewit, a fine fellow, that the Eritreans had turned as mean and human as the rest of us, no longer Ted’s unique people, no longer men and women of exceptional enlightenment. And no longer the beacon Ted and I had had no right to look for, but believed we had found.

  I was sick that night, and it wasn’t the murky Kenyan wine Gracie and I had drunk at the bar. After coming home, we had been sitting in the lounge chatting with Ghebrehewit and Habtom and with a sheik from the Ethiopian desert region of Ogaden. This man, dressed in a dark suit with an open-neck collar, was impressive, an Oxford graduate, son of an important man amongst the semi-nomadic Ogadenians, who had been much misused and had suffered ferociously under Mengistu and in the famine. The man had a doctorate, and the Eritreans introduced him to us as head of the Ogaden National Liberation Front. As surely as eighteenth-century Scots had wanted their independence from England, this man and his Muslim brothers wanted independence from Negasso’s Ethiopia, so now he and the Eritreans were friends.

  As we sat talking, my stomach convulsed with very little warning, though the ten seconds of nausea beforehand were intense. I had vomit in my mouth and burning in my nostrils in the midst of a very urbane conversation on African affairs and Ethiopian minorities, all of whom took comfort from what the Eritreans had managed to achieve. I ran all at once from the room and so into the toilet, where perhaps two-thirds of the voided contents of my stomach landed acrid on the floor tiles. I continued to spasm, and then, aware of the mess I had made, began cleaning the floor with toilet paper. I was aware of the man from Ogaden standing behind me. He said, “Don’t worry about that! Leave it for the servants.”

  * * *

  It might be that Asmara was saved and my duty to the lens facility finished, but I had developed a new duty to Gracie, who wanted to take a helicopter carrying a general and some troops to Tessenai near the Sudanese border. She’d insisted on going even after I told her that it took only one Ethiopian soldier equipped with a rifle-propelled grenade who had not heard about the truce, or didn’t give a damn, to end an aerial careen to Tessenai. Gracie believed that such considerations added savor to the expedition, so I’d insisted on accompanying her. As we waited to lift off, my mind was full, as always when it came to rotor-driven aircraft, of the neurotic but not far-fetched possibility that Cath might need to absorb a double fatality.

  The helicopter was full of official-looking Eritreans, all of them in fatigues but none carrying arms. The three aircrew had an air of competence and toughness and wore pistols—that seemed to represent the extent of the expeditionary armament.

  The seats were uncomfortable and ran along the sides of the fuselage, and the noise of engines was too loud for us to hear each other. It was a long haul before we began to see, squinting through the ports, signs of the recent Ethiopian advance in the form of great smudges of burned houses on a yellow-brown earth, and blackened rectangles of kraals whose cattle were gone, driven south or slaughtered. Those bitter thumbprints in the terrain seemed especially malign today, imbuing me with further nausea in this juddering, unkind aircraft. Gracie, by contrast, was on top of her game, conversing loudly with Habtom, and kneeling on her seat to film through the window and, for a period, from behind the pilots and into a limitless west. The Sahel—the line of transition between the Sahara and the savannah.

  I was very grateful when we landed. There were military trucks at the airport to take us to town, though they creaked to a stop on the outskirts of Tessenai and we were shown the wreckage of a new cotton-processing factory, tall and of sheet steel. The Ethiopian troops who had taken Tessenai had not had tank support, so faced with this World Bank–funded cotton mill, with its storage silos and conveyor belts, they had undertaken the job of destroying it with grenades. On a freshly erected steel wall, they’d had time to write in Amharic script, “Comrade Issayas, we know this mill cost you a lot. That is why we are so happy to destroy it.”

  I watched Gracie filming, thinking, This is what would have happened in Ted’s lens factory in Asmara if the Ethiopian army had got that far. As Gracie moved energetically amongst the electric motors that had driven the belts and were now burned out or eviscerated with grenades, Habtom told me dolefully, “This mill had not processed a single cotton bud. It is utterly new.”

  The town of Tessenai was empty—the Ethiopians gone, the citizens not yet returned. Throughout the streets filaments of audiotape were draped across fences and down roadways that were not so different in appearance from semideserted streets in Australian country towns. Except this mass of thin green tape was from cassettes of Tigrinyan music and lyrics the invaders had found in the houses of the town. They’d pulled the tape out of the cassettes and festooned the streets with it, as if they were depriving their foe of their voice. Did the Ethiopian officers ask them to do this, or was the hatred of the uppity Eritreans as intense as this in the average Ethiopian youth?

  The day seemed further yellowed with the bile of this act, as with my own. We saw houses tumbled or wrecked, and cars assaulted with grenades, but the two chief objects of destruction seemed to have been Eritrean music and the cotton mill. Out of need or spite, the Ethiopian troops had also excreted in the operating theater at the abandoned hospital. In the emergency ward, where there was a chart of parts of the male and female body marked in the Eritrean language, they had assaulted the breasts and vagina of the woman and the groin of the man with their bayonet points, gouging large indentations not only in the charts but in the wall behind. And yet I had innocently imagined the Ethiopians would let Gracie and me give film witness of them blowing up the lens facility! I looked at the chart and thought that I knew nothing about humanity, that I was a mere visitor, and the sickness came over me and I went out into the hospital garden and vomited.

  * * *


  The following day there was still no aviation fuel for commercial flights. We visited Issayas himself, the trim, handsome president who lived in a normal house in the old village named Tselot outside Asmara. He had always disapproved of the cult of personality he had seen fostered on behalf of Mao during the time he had spent as a student in China, so there were no posters of Issayas’s visage on telegraph poles or walls. Gracie was permitted to film our encounter in a plain yellow-painted office block. Issayas spoke softly and with careful enunciation, telling me he would not let the Ethiopians take back, on the basis of some historic fiction, the provinces which were established as Eritrean by the Organization of African Unity. But they would try, he said, they would try.

  I knew, didn’t I, he asked, in a tone that was liquid and almost sedating, that the Eritrean people had just had an acute emergency? Of course I did, he assured himself, and Gracie and me.

  My head swam under the impact of his silken delivery, his soft lips. You must be anxious to get home, he surmised. Asmara, meantime, should be a city of joy to you, he told us with a brief smile.

  Three bedridden days later, at the end of which I declared myself better, lying through my teeth, on a gray morning we were taken to Asmara Airport. The hulking Russian pilots who had been waiting out the war in the Asmara Hilton near the airport came aboard in their uniforms and took us out of the temperate highlands of Eritrea across a sweltering sea to witheringly hot Jeddah and an airport full of Indonesian pilgrims coming from the Haj. They filled the aircraft cabin with containers of water from the holy Zamzam Well in Mecca.