To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  Fryer River itself, one of the earth’s most ancient watercourses, also mimicked Africa by being a ghost of a river. It ran only in rain time, perhaps once in three years or even once in ten. From its warm bed she-oaks and eucalyptus trees grew, drawing on a secret river deep beneath the geographic one.

  On the empty banks, Bernadette and I lived in a trailer partitioned into bedroom at one end and kitchen–living room at the other. Friends from Melbourne slept in that living room during visits. Air conditioning came from the settlement’s diesel generator. But the Pitjantjara and Pintubi did not always want the government’s light or artificial breezes. Few of the Pintubi had a taste for air conditioning. Bernadette and I both saw that the people were more concerned with the night cold than the blaze of noon. There seemed to be a connection between the cold nights and the ceaseless activity of spirits, who, during the hours of sleep, might steal the crucial coating of fat from around the kidneys of a man or a woman.

  I believe I’d never done better work or had more of it to do than in Fryer River. I was so zealous; I had encountered a fresh way of looking at the earth. The tribal council brought me to the view that houses in the European sense were not always a mercy, for the Pintubi in particular but even for the often more “worldly” Pitjantjara. These people were attached to the earth in a literal sense. There were stories of Pintubi who, when arrested and imprisoned on floors of cement or planking, died in the night of pining for the mother-breast of earth. Housing seemed to the Pintubi a ridiculous closet into which to crowd a human soul.

  The other large claim on my attention in Fryer River was the strange desert addiction to petrol sniffing. Pintubis and Pitjantjara, nomads in their hearts, looked upon everything as equally a product of nature. I liked to expatiate on this fact to visitors. In European societies, I’d say, the disposable—tissues, pens, packaging—declares itself. The collection and hoarding of the merely disposable is always looked upon as an illness, and collectors of garbage and wrappings and newspapers have been certified and locked away for seeing permanent value in the throwaway.

  The desert nomad, however, takes the aberrant view that everything is equally disposable, that everything has a limited and a merely vegetable life—except the spirit itself, which is eternal and which endlessly returns!

  The end products of this nomadic view were in fact littered all over the desert. Tribespeople who went to Alice Springs would spend too much of their mineral royalty money on secondhand automobiles—bombs, lemons, clankers. When these cars gave out on the way back to Fryer River, in the dry river beds or the red foothills, the Pitjantjara and Pintubi driver didn’t feel orphaned by a failure of technology, as a European traveler would. Sometimes he would push the vehicle onto its side to see if any obvious fault declared itself from beneath. But if nothing could be done with the thing, he walked away from it without too much regret. For its cycle was finished.

  The desert west of Ayers Rock was littered with vehicles which—in the dry atmosphere—never decayed.

  And an unhappy conjunction existed between the vehicles and the Fryer River children. These boys would have been, in a traditional and untouched tribal setup, going through the lessons, making the long journeys to particular sites, training in ritual enactments; would have been desert seminarians. But the old men looked upon them as rendered partially unfit through white education and rock ’n’ roll.

  Because of their unworthiness, their initiations were delayed. They treated the painful gap by siphoning petrol from the desert wrecks and inhaling it for a high. During my stay at Fryer River, Freddy Numati, a man of about forty-five years who headed the tribal council and was a trained mechanic, one day led me to a tree under which lay a dead fourteen-year-old Pitjantjara boy, his face jammed into a peach tin half full of petrol.

  The elders had no tribal precedent for dealing with this strange addiction. They looked to me because they knew my spirit was more akin to petrol than theirs. They looked to the police, too, who came through on patrols. The council were more willing than I would have liked to use the police as a means of ejecting some petrol-obsessed youth from the Fryer River settlement to the reform school outside Alice Springs. For there clinical psychologists and social workers, their souls also more akin to petroleum products, could deal with him. To the council, this petrol-sniffing disease had arrived at Fryer River like an unscannable virus from another planet.

  The idea that one should thrash a child for its addiction, or kick it in the arse, again had no history among the desert people. In fact, the tradition was the opposite, and for every blow you landed on a child the members of his clan had to strike you back.

  Unequipped, I found myself speaking to the sniffers, negotiating between the police and the tribal elders.

  In a normal suburb of tormented people, Bernadette would have been superb and compassionate. But it was against the tribal order for the elders to ask Bernadette Yang to counsel young men. I didn’t particularly resent this. I believed that Bernadette was busy enough with the women.

  The women had begun painting in acrylics, using the designs which had for thousands of years been employed for painting in ochres on sand. The Pitjantjara and Pintubi symbols adapted to this method were circular patterns for the waterhole spirit places and dots signifying the plenteous spirits themselves. These paintings were maps to the core of Australia, but they were esthetically pleasing as well, and a good one could sell for $10,000 in the United States or Europe.

  Bernadette was learning to use this painting technique, though she did not understand the patterns as a tribal person would. As far as I knew at this stage, she had found among the women the same perfect place I enjoyed among the tribal council.

  But, according to what visitors told me afterward, Bernadette Yang was already unhappy. She had begun to complain of the desert women, of how they avoided her eyes and fell silent as she approached. I barely noticed it though. Like Masihi, I was besotted with a people I could not belong to; I was engrossed in their scheme. When that happens, it’s too easy for a certain type of human to sacrifice the usual attachments of blood, of what you’d call—even though our trailer didn’t have one—the hearth.

  I didn’t notice. I would need it explained and ultimately demonstrated to me. Henry had had the Fetasha to alert him to the threat to his Somali. I needed something of that weight and obviousness to grab my attention. I wouldn’t be getting it.

  Trucking the Paraplegic

  In the shimmering wreckage of Suakin, a town which had been left to decay after the Turks departed this coast and yet looked as if it had been bombarded, the vehicle which would take us down the Red Sea coast and into the Eritrean mountains arrived. It halted among the rubble in the laneway outside the Eritrean barracks and clinic where we had been waiting. It was small and, in theory, faster than the big Mercedes trucks. Sand bogs would reduce that advantage though. Deutsche Arbeiter Bund, it declared in rainbow colors on its green side—a gift of the West Germans. The muscular young driver wore military fatigues and a bandanna round his neck. His name, he said, was Tecleh. He loped and was casual. He called to us in subdued English. “Ready to join the mountain bandits?” It was what their enemies called them. Mountain bandits.

  In that heat, the three of us were bewildered children. We watched Tecleh lift our luggage, including Henry’s massive duffel, onto the roof. He tethered it all there, covering it with a tarpaulin to keep the sand out. But he would not let us board yet. He was waiting for someone but did not know how to explain that to us. “A sick man,” he said. I imagined a leprous figure staggering toward us across the town’s rubble heaps.

  While we waited, four Eritrean nurses—two male, two female—appeared in the courtyard carrying a stretcher with a wasted shape on it. They eased it out of the gate into the laneway. The shape had the face of a young man, another Eritrean hero. A further two nurses—paramedics, aides—followed the litter, one bearing surgical infusion bags, the other a metal box with a red cross painted on it.
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  I watched Tecleh stretch a foam rubber mattress along the floor in the rear of the truck. The stretcher bearers loaded the young man onto this, two of them boarding backwards and then stooping to keep the stretcher level. When the sick man was in place, the two women bearers at his feet also boarded the truck and exchanged mumbled wishes and handshakes with him. Then all four dismounted and made room for the lean young men carrying the drip bags and the box of medicines. These two, apparently, were to travel with us. One of them, seeing the lanky American Henry about to take a photograph, called “No!” and held up a preventive hand. Perhaps they feared their Sudanese friends might be affronted to see, turning up in some international magazine, a photograph which showed that if one of the injured rebels at Suakin got ill, the Eritreans trucked him back over the mountains for surgery by their own doctors, their own team.

  The two young men aboard began connecting a drip to a vein in the patient’s arm. One of them opened the metal box and took out a syringe, some pain-killer already drawn up into it.

  “Barefoot doctors,” Tecleh said. But they weren’t barefoot. They wore the Eritrean plastic sandal which, it would soon become apparent, was one of the dress icons of the rebels.

  “Trucking a paraplegic?” Henry asked me.

  In the vehicle as packed, Tecleh, the girl, and Henry took the front. I was a little surprised that Christine let Henry ride at her side, in view of what had happened between them in Port Sudan. Perhaps she was letting me know now that the clasped hands in the streets of Port Sudan hadn’t meant anything more than similar gestures between schoolchildren. In any case, I sat in the back with my legs hooked onto the opposite seat and bridging the body of the sick boy on the floor. Then, seated toward the rear, on the least comfortable seats over the back wheels, the two barefoot doctors!

  The young man called gently to me from the floor, “What is your name? What is your nation?”

  The truck moved. He closed his eyes at this early shock to the suspension, and also in exhaustion.

  I was aware that he was going home, to the nation of his desire, that he was attached to his cause the way only such time-displaced eighteenth-century survivals as the Poles were. I felt a strange embarrassment as I spoke to him. I would never discover what his name was. Later I asked the girl, Christine, if she’d ascertained it at some stage on the road. She was often attentive to these things.

  But she hadn’t found it out either.

  Our track out of Sudan and into Eritrea was at first a flat and unapologetic desert road. Sometimes it looped close to the Red Sea, and you saw a strange border land of vivid green reed beds, and among them a low, clapboard fishing village. These people fished in boats built on a most antique, high-pooped design, some of which could be seen offshore that afternoon. Made sedentary by the plenty of the sea, the fisher people bought their goods from the Beja nomads, who—according to all I’ve read—pitied them, and whom they despised.

  Tecleh, the young Eritrean truck driver, shouting above the noise of the engine, made what sounded like one of his few set speeches, this one on how to behave at the last Sudanese border post, which was still two hours to the south. There were two policemen there, he said, one a sergeant. “Never sees an Englishman, never sees an American, never sees a Frenchman. No wife, nothing to make him happy. When he says, Where is your passport? you say you have the movement permit. You go to the border regions, you say. But you do not say, We are going to Eritrea!”

  There was no single road, only a set of alternating tracks, a series of sandy, treacherous options. Along them that afternoon, as apparently on all other afternoons, the Eritrean trucks plowed, traveling empty up to Port Sudan to collect aid consigned to them—however much against the wish of Addis—and returning south laden. Supposedly, if you had crawled over the backs of these trucks, you would have found sorghum and wheat, Oxfam high-protein biscuit, water pump replacements, canisters of raw pharmaceuticals, and stacks of plastic bags to be filled with Eritrea’s own surgical drips in deep sterile caves.

  All afternoon we encountered these Mercedes trucks, green-painted, each of them with a number on its flanks, the number the last thing we saw before we raised our shawls over our mouths or clamped our hats or bandannas there against the world of dust.

  I couldn’t avoid being touched and excited by all this afternoon traffic. The American Henry got enthusiastic, too. He leaned over from the front seat, where he was sitting with Christine, and yelled, “These guys are astounding! Running all this. And you know what? The world hates ’em for it! The world’s hooked into the idea of the helpless African!” Even from his dry mouth little globules of spit sprang. And as an Eritrean truck lumbered past, dragging its mountain of dust, Henry resisted the normal courtesies of winding up his window and instead leaned out, choking, from the passenger door.

  “Way to go, Africa!” he screamed.

  Christine squirmed around in her seat to share a mysterious smile with me.

  With all this movement, it came as a surprise to see an occasional nomad standing swathed, all except his eyes covered, in a brilliant jacket and white jellaba and turban, holding his sheathed crusader sword by the handle; a man impenetrable to dust. The owner of this empty quarter.

  He drew my eyes inland, toward the beautiful Red Sea hills where, if the dust cleared, you could see strings of camels bearing nomad women through the fumes of the sun toward tents strung along the wadis. Beja people. Muslims, they spoke Arabic only for occasional convenience of trade, keeping instead an ancient hermetic language of their own for more important things. So when they faced east at sunrise and sunset, they exalted Allah in their own, stubborn, aged tongue and—so Stella informed me—watched Egyptian soap operas on battery-operated TVs in their tents.

  In better days, one of the most ancient of the pilgrimage routes had run through here, through this quarter vacant on modern maps. The old route, which ran from Shendi on the Nile to Suakin, had depended on the Bejas’ blessing once, and for a thousand years every pilgrim had needed their goodwill to make it to the Red Sea. But war and bad government and the mysterious intent of God had spread the Sahara right down here. And, in any case, the jet plane had altered the travel arrangements pilgrims made.

  The last Sudanese town—half clapboard houses, half nomad tents—stood for mysterious reasons of its own on a random acreage of sand. It did not even serve as an authentic border post, since it was still many miles before the Eritrean border. Botany had no place there. Botany lay with its seeds deep in the earth, waiting for the rumor of moisture.

  The road was fairly level and Henry was able to talk to us without screaming. “These people have it pretty good,” he told me. “The Eritreans pay the camel herders thirty dollars to take bags in by the coastal route, through the Sahel. Now and then an Ethiopian MIG shoots one up, gets the driver or the camel. Just the same, thirty dollars is big money here. Danger money. Fat city.”

  I wondered how he knew all this. And all I remember is that the leanest of people loped through the town.

  A wadi divided it in two, and all the goats and camels were along this watercourse, dry as it was. It was as if they had a genetic rumor in their brains that if water were ever to flow, it would be here. They’d discovered long before the Greeks that water finds its own level. They shuffled and groaned in the sage way of desert beasts.

  As if by ritual, Tecleh tried to run by the police post, a hut as nondescript as the rest of this town, marked only by the flag of Sudan, pure green in the futile hope of fertility.

  A young policeman came running diagonally across our path, hallooing, carrying an old .303 rifle left behind by the British.

  “Ai-ai-ai!” said Tecleh, like an Italian, and pulled to a stop.

  When the young policeman caught up, he opened the back doors first and inspected the paraplegic who lay on the floor beneath me. “How are you?” he asked the young veteran in English. But then he came round to the front and spoke an argumentative Arabic with Tecleh. Tecleh spoke
jovial, languid Arabic back. Two hundred yards out in a mist of sand, aid trucks came and went as if the young cop did not see them. He continued to take our vehicle seriously, however. He paced up and down for a while in front of its grillwork, staring at it, then cast an eye upward at the covered luggage in the rack. Maybe, as Tecleh intimated, this was the only acting fun he’d had for weeks.

  Next he put his head in the window and looked severely at Henry and Christine, and then over the back seat at me. The two barefoot doctors were exempt from his professional concern. But he seemed to be confident that the rest of us would fail at least one of the Sudan’s proliferating sets of regulations.

  “All of you down!” he ordered.

  To leave the truck I had to roll my body along the two parallel seats, making sure that my hips didn’t fall and injure the paraplegic. At last I jumped through the open door. The young man with the rifle stared at me. You couldn’t tell what complicated set of political and tribal creeds, orthodoxies, prescriptions were operating in a man like that—you’d have needed to be Sudanese yourself to work it out.

  Henry walked back and forth in front of the young man, muttering one- or two-word complaints in Arabic. Christine murmured to me, “But they will not stop us?”

  “No,” I told her. “No. They’ll just go through the rituals.”

  The young policeman led us to a clapboard hut. On its shady side a more senior policeman was cooking part of the spine of a goat in a frying pan over a vivid little fire of sticks. His hands were covered with flour, but when he saw us he began to brush the flour off on his khaki pants. The campaign ribbons he wore on his chest may once have been vivid scarlets and emeralds and blues, but now they were reduced to a general umber. All martial meaning had been blasted out of them by the wind and the sun.