To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  In fact, what happened then was that the Soviets decided, for the sake of control of the Babel Mandeb and of the Dhalak Islands out in the Red Sea, to intrude mightily and in terms which would be recorded on film by Masihi.

  Eritrean rebels began to withdraw from their positions threatening the string of cities, the railway line, the central east-west road which filleted Eritrea. From his hotel in Asmara, Salim used a relative—perhaps, I surmised, even Amna, his Asmaran “niece”—to contact the secret Eritrean cells. For the first time in history one of his tribe had been forced to identify himself with the retreating cause. All the barbarities of the past five centuries had not caused one of his mercantile clan to do what he was now doing. “And they speak as if the twentieth century were the high point of the human soul!” he told me.

  On the same night that the agents of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front took him out of Asmara disguised as a peasant and bearing false papers, his wife and two sons escaped Keren. It was the desolation of the northern mountains which now became the portion of this consummate townsman.

  The townless maze of brown peaks.

  Casualties and the Heart

  Moka the stringy veteran brought the news up the stone steps of the terrace, two at a time, that Masihi had been definitely located. The cameraman was known to be on his way to Himbol, a dry riverbed half a night’s drive south, where he intended to film a locust plague.

  “It is hot and dusty,” Moka told us, “but there is a bush shower there. And then the daughter meets the father!”

  “Merci bien, Monsieur Moka,” Christine told him, and she closed her eyes and covered them with her hands, reminding me—strangely—of a woman whose son has been found. I had an impulse to go up and congratulate her, but her manner was very private and I decided against it.

  “Merci bien,” he repeated, hitting his skeletal chest with his fist, as if she’d told him a joke.

  Henry, Lady Julia, Salim Genete, and I were all on the terrace drinking tea. The news of coming moves sobered us. Salim coughed. “Ai-ai-ai, if I could but travel with you … but there are certain questions of health.”

  It was the first time he had mentioned anything to do with health. But it did explain why he didn’t go afield searching for his son, the way Christine intended to hunt down her father the cameraman.

  Any other travel purpose I had was now subsumed into getting the daughter to the father. I didn’t think that could have been Tessfaha’s idea. I wondered if I should take Moka aside, mention Tessfaha’s name. I would have liked reassurance, the sense of traveling on rails.

  Later I overheard Moka assuring Lady Julia that around Himbol she would find many peasant refugee women to speak to. It sounded as if Lady Julia had expressed the same doubts I felt.

  After midnight in the guest house, in the room I shared with Henry, I was shaken awake by Salim, who was fully dressed in turban, white shirt, upper half of business suit, jellaba. A switched-on torch shone in his hand.

  I forced myself painfully awake from dreams of the Eritreans’ relentless bunker technology. The handsome dental surgeon and her picture album had figured in the dreams, as had Salim’s guerrilla son. I thought that this was what Salim was waking me for, a celebration party for the arrival of the boy. So there’d be more of the bitter liquor called sewa to be drunk—except, of course, by Salim, who was saved from that duty by being an orthodox Muslim.

  In fact, I could hear music outside and a sort of party in progress.

  But Salim looked wan and not celebratory. “I wonder could you help me?” he asked. “I don’t like to ask one of my fellow Eritreans, since they might make too much of it.”

  He pushed into my hand a little vial of white tablets. “Would you come with me to the hospital? There has been a great battle. Wounded are arriving in front of the operating theaters. I have been told that one of them is my niece.”

  “The girl?” I asked, thinking of the remarkable bureaucrat I’d seen being helped down the defile toward an injection of vitamins.

  “No, not that one, not Amna Nurhussein. Another one. My dead sister’s girl.” Salim seemed to emit a mist of grief which I thought I could very nearly see in the light of the torch.

  “These tablets are for the girl?” I asked, still in a half-daze.

  “Not for the girl. For me.” He had dropped his voice. “Kindly watch me, my friend. Should you see my face contorting, give me one of those. Angina is my grief, you see. If they knew that it was severe, as indeed it is, they would not have let me travel here.”

  He rehearsed me in what symptoms I should look for: sudden halting of his speech, a blueness around his mouth and eye sockets.

  Across the room, Henry was sitting on his bed barefooted and yawning. He apparently feared he might be asked to join us, though he could have overheard very little of what Salim and I were saying.

  “Sorry,” he said perfunctorily. “I declare I can’t move. I’m struck down with the big D.”

  It was clear he wanted to avoid the hospital, its poignant competence which made his African blues deeper.

  I sat up and pulled my boots on. From beyond the window came a drumming, the thrum of a stringed instrument, and a woman’s voice following the jerky line of some Eritrean song of triumph.

  “Oh Jesus, boys, here she comes again,” said Henry, lunging upright and grabbing a wad of toilet paper. It was an authentic performance. I repented of my earlier doubts.

  Salim and I followed the American into the corridor. More sedately than Henry, the two of us made for the door. In the dining room, Eritrean soldiers and officials, using their unwound turbans or their shawls in the two-handed manner of English football crowds flexing team scarves, swayed to the music outside and passed among them two powdered-milk cans of sewa. Moka was in this group. He came up to me, his eyes shining. He looked feverish. Because of his chest troubles, he’d told me earlier, he wasn’t supposed to drink sewa. Now, briskly, he wound his shawl around his neck, taking on his official stature again.

  “Oh, this is so big, Mr. Darcy. If there were cameras in Eritrea, this would be headlines. They would know about us in every place. Two Ethiopian brigades! Two! A total destruction! On the Nacfa Front.”

  In the West, I liked to play the pacifist. Being militant didn’t seem an option. But here I felt the pull of Moka’s primitive martial excitement. With a flush of blood I remembered that the Ethiopians had promised to drive the Eritreans “into the Red Sea.” “Into the sands of the Sudan,” Mengistu had put it once. This grievous intention of the Dergue’s had made the Eritreans into just warriors, a corps of the righteous. To feel an association with warriors was a new experience for me, but I suppose that what the news had unleashed in Moka, and even in me, was the African equivalent of a good old 1942-style post-El Alamein, post-Stalingrad joy at battles won.

  Moka noticed Salim, the sober face the older man carried. He reached out his hand. “Your niece will be cured,” he said. “Doctor Nercyo will see to it. And your son will come, my friend! One morning he will be here in the guest house when you wake up!”

  Moka led us at once to the door and, on this night of victory, swept both blackout curtains aside at once. His minute torchlight hit the rock walls as he bounded down the defile toward the truck he had waiting. For the moment his wounds meant nothing to him. Salim, uttering small slow noises of Islamic resignation, was far more unsteady on his feet. “There have been too many of my tribe,” I heard him murmur elliptically, as if to himself.

  Our truck, when we reached it, rolled off between bands of singing and dancing Eritreans. They were the same kind of woolly-haired, piercing-eyed youths Tessfaha had shown me photographs of in that London restaurant.

  “Your son wasn’t in this battle?” I yelled over the noise of the road.

  “No,” Salim called back. “Though God knows. No, he was on his way to me. Perhaps. We shall see.”

  Moka himself joined in the loud talk. From him we heard a somewhat florid account of w
hat had happened. The EPLF had attacked two small towns to the south of what he called “holy Asmara”: Areza to the southeast of the city, Maidema to the southwest, each garrisoned by an entrenched Ethiopian brigade! The assault on the wire and the trench lines had begun three hours before dawn, and both towns were entirely in the hands of the rebels hours before noon.

  “The sun,” said Moka, achieving a bardic overview of the battle, “shone not caring on the bodies of the poor conscripts of the Dergue!”

  I privately reflected that it must have shone, too, on the tightly curled heads and the British-gaitered legs of certain fallen Eritreans, veterans and novices, for whom one day sad fanfares might sound in Asmara.

  And above all, even to an intermittent journalist like me, the figures seemed high. “You say two brigades, Moka?” I asked.

  Moka went on in his sing-song, poetic-martial voice. “Four thousand Ethiopians are fallen or are prisoners, are scathed or are unscathed. But there has been also a relief column from Adi Igra. Our village militias and our volunteers turned it around at midmorning. So, four thousand and more!”

  From a hole at the side of the road, Salim’s bureaucrat kinswoman, the glorious rinser named Amna, emerged all at once. She moved nimbly, whereas last time I’d seen her she’d been limping and needed Neroyo’s vitamins. She waved to the truck. When we stopped I got down from the cabin to make room for her, but she refused to take it. She climbed into the back. Reboarded, I strained around in my seat to see if she was comfortable. She looked at me for only a second with limpid irony, like one of those omniscient girls who saw through your crookedest advances when you were fourteen.

  Although the unconcluded business of Bernadette (which I couldn’t accept as finished even though Bernadette thought it was) lay like a filter over all I saw, I found with a strange excitement that I thought of this Eritrean woman Amna as a kind of kinswoman, too. All her features, her flowing gestures (so I thought in the heat and ardor of that peculiar night) seemed to have lain a long time unidentified in my imagination, waiting on this woman, on Amna Nurhussein, to assume them and give them a focus.

  Salim, too, took up an uncomfortably crooked position so that he could speak to her as we went along. The conversation seemed to be in Tigrinyan. She answered her uncle/cousin liquidly. Now and then there would again be an instant of ironic apology in her face.

  Moka had now produced a communiqué from the pocket of his khaki battle jacket. The poetry was over. He was giving us the figures. The noise of the vehicle on the stony road was enormous, but his damaged, exultant lungs overrode it.

  “Twenty vehicles—that’s value fifty thousand dollars each. Five T-55 tanks—their values so hard to guess. Four one-hundred-twenty-two-millimeter and eight seventy-six-millimeter heavy artillery. Each of them stands for a hospital Mengistu might have given the Somalis or the Oromos or even the people of Addis themselves! Eight fuel and ammunition depots! Three light weapons magazines! Twelve supply stores! Thousands of the AK-47s which were theirs, but which in our hands they fear!”

  “Oh dear, the ambulances,” called Salim, breaking into Moka’s bardic rundown.

  I saw that black ambulances, inching slowly along ahead of us, occupied most of the valley floor now. Moka, Salim, the kinswoman Amna, and I abandoned the truck and began walking toward the terraces outside the operating theater, where the stones were covered with wounded on stretchers.

  I found myself shivering at the sight. I flexed my jaw to keep my teeth from giving away my condition of terror. As a reporter of fact, I counted perhaps fifty litters set down there. It was all reminiscent, I thought, as the trembling spasm gave out, of the tent of the Afabet women. There was a notable lack of protest, of moaning. I thought at first that this was because the wounded must all have been sedated for their ambulance journey. But then I noticed certain signs of the usual mannerliness of the Horn. For example: A boy lowered from the back of one of the ambulances onto the stone terrace insisted on reaching his thin arm up and shaking hands with each of his stretcher bearers. The next soldier lifted down did exactly the same.

  “Why do they all shake hands?” I asked Moka.

  But it was Salim who answered absently. His eyes were darting for a sight of his wounded niece. “Pride. They don’t wish to die without having thanked everyone they should.”

  By a stone bench where on quieter nights surgeons might have sat to drink their tea, a young peasant—leaning on a crutch—held a surgical drip upright in his left hand. There was a marvelous stillness about him. The drip bag did not shake, the peasant did not alter his stature by a millimeter. The feed line on the drip ran down into the arm of a thin-faced girl. She was not as pale as Salim in spite of her wounds. Someone, I could see, had introduced a Nilotic darkness into both Amna’s face and hers. A blanket covered her up to her chin, and around her neck was a plastic plaque on which Tigrinyan script proclaimed what I guessed to be Nil by mouth.

  Even before Salim and Amna spotted her, I had decided she was Salim’s niece purely through resemblance, particularly to the exquisite Amna. I pointed her out.

  “Ai-ai-ai!” said Salim.

  An extraordinary sort of feral hiss escaped Amna.

  Salim knelt agilely beside the wounded girl. But Amna the bureaucrat half-crouched in a far more awkward manner. Perhaps Doctor Neroyo’s injections of vitamins had not quite brought her back to full suppleness.

  The eyes of the girl on the stretcher opened. They settled on me but then mercifully moved to her uncle Salim. She began speaking at once to Salim, hindered it seemed only by a dryness in her throat.

  “Ah-ah!” said Salim, with little breathy groans. “Say nothing. Say nothing.”

  She kept speaking just the same in a thin musical voice. When she had finished, Salim seemed to feel bound by tradition to translate for me, the foreigner. “She tells me my son is okay, waiting in Nacfa for a truck. But it might be days. Even the Russian buses we captured last year, they’re using them to carry the wounded and prisoners. So he cannot catch a bus.”

  The girl continued talking, like a child wanting to clear her toll of messages before sleeping. “She says he was not in the battle,” Salim further murmured.

  “Though she was,” said Amna.

  Even there, beside the litter, I was taken by the way Amna used her English, as though she’d learned it in the abstract and loved it purely for its building blocks. Each word was well marked in her mouth by sharp consonants and by the deft sibilance of such words as she and was.

  A young surgeon in a green coat came to the stretcher, knelt, conversed somberly with Salim. I watched Salim’s face for possible symptoms, but none displayed themselves. The surgeon drew the blankets down from the girl’s body. In the instant before I looked away I saw she was dressed only in the remnants of a khaki shirt. Her thighs and her legs were bare. Gauze and cotton wadding ran from her navel down to her pelvis and then, like the head of an inverted T, across it. “Ai-ai-ai!” said Salim.

  As two orderlies lifted the girl to take her away, I noticed that her eyes were quite sharply focused yet somehow suspended. They had that same quality of pernicious independence that I’d seen in the mouths of the children of the Afabet women. They were waiting for the surgeons. They had suspended judgment.

  We suddenly had more space now on the terrace to stand and debate our next moves. Amna suggested to me that she might stay with her uncle Salim, and Salim with her. That I should go back to the guest house to rest. With Salim’s angina tablets jiggling in my pocket, I knew I shouldn’t give in to her. Yet she seemed to know our party was meant to leave before dawn, looking for Masihi.

  I could not consider sleep now in any case. I was sharply awake. I had suffered from some of the massed expectancy of the fifty or so stunned presences on the stretchers on the stone terrace. I was for the time being as brave and as shocked as they were. I yearned for the Eritreans to permit me to keep watch.

  The surgeons worked, the terrace began to empty a little further
, the night grew icy. I did not have much chance to talk with Amna, who moved here and there about the terrace, insinuating herself into spaces between stretchers, talking to nurses and drip-holders and doctors, murmuring at the wounded. I could tell I lacked probable cause to walk beside her.

  Amna returned at last to the space from which her wounded cousin had been lifted. An orderly brought the three of us blankets. I watched as Amna sat on a stone bench and wrapped herself leanly into hers. To my embarrassment, the best bench had been vacated for me, and Salim kept pointing me to it.

  “Are you well?” I asked him.

  “I am well. Don’t worry. Ciao and goodnight.”

  I showed him which of my pockets his tablets were in, but he dismissed this information with a flapping of his hand. Shaping my bush hat into a pillow, I flopped. I would lie down among the heroes, I told myself, but there would be no sleep. Nor would there be the sort of futile, self-pitying tears which had incapacitated me in Port Sudan.

  Despite everything, maybe because of everything—the strain of behaving well and of all the terrace sights—a chilled sleep took me whole. Even in the midst of it I could feel the night through the thin blanket and the denim pants.

  I woke a little time later when the moon was high. I could see the plump surgeon Neroyo standing talking to Salim and Amna. I was ashamed to have been sleeping while they were in such busy discourse. Around Salim’s shoulders his blanket was still draped, and over the terrace could be heard a multiple gurgling and rasping, the snoring of the post-operative.

  Neroyo finished his conversation with Salim and Amna, noticed me, nodded, smiled briefly, then went inside.

  I stood up. I could not stop myself from quivering with the cold. I knew, too, that when this spasm of shivering passed, Salim would tell me something I might want to postpone hearing.