To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  Salim murmured, “Internal bleeding, Doctor Neroyo said. Too much damage. They needed so much blood and the supplies are low.”

  I wanted at first to ask why they had not roused me and taken mine. I did not say anything, because the unnegotiable nature of his niece’s passing, the fact it couldn’t be argued with, seemed to be a comfort to him.

  “It’s Allah’s will,” he murmured, and the trite line had somehow great power in his mouth.

  Amna argued that Salim and I should both go back to the guest house now. It was as if she didn’t want me there for the mourning phase. Did she want to weep and keen, and would my presence inhibit her? As she spoke, in any case, stretcher bearers appeared with what must have been Salim’s niece wrapped in a blanket.

  “Oh dear,” murmured Salim. “We need to bury her before day-light.”

  Having his tablets, I was forced to stumble into an informal procession behind the litter. We had gone maybe a hundred paces when Salim halted, grabbed my arm and looked out at me through a suddenly twisted face with profound and solemn meaning. If the situation had been different, I could have yelled with the pain of his grip. But he was drowning and I was his single contact with the earth. One-handed, I got his tablets out, opened the lid with my teeth, clumsily poured a couple of pills into the palm of my hand, brought it up to his mouth. I think that I managed to get both of them in without asking myself whether this was an overdose or not.

  We both remained still and he leaned on me. I could smell his sweat and it was strangely pungent, like the smell of a father. I could see Amna, the four stretcher bearers, and the dead niece receding before us. I wondered if I should call to them.

  After half a minute Salim’s grip eased. The hand on my arm became more independent. The fingers retracted from the pits they’d made in my arm.

  “Ai,” he sighed at last. “We can catch them.” And, too fast for his own good, he dragged me off toward the others.

  The graveyard at Orotta was unmarked and indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. A few modest superstructures of clay and stone, oval in shape, randomly studded with lumps of a white marblelike stone taken from the hillsides, marked the place. Even the funerary arts of Eritrea were geared to be invisible from the air.

  Among these plain memorials lay a wide grave which caught the moon, now at its zenith. There were few shadows. One other blanketed shape had been seated in the pit, though there was space for a dozen.

  The diggers, a party of boys and girls in khaki, perhaps artillerists from the mountaintops around, stood quietly to one side with their shovels. The stretcher bearers crouched, lifted Salim’s niece in her blanket off the litter, and lowered her down to two soldiers who had jumped into the pit to receive her.

  The boys handled her with delicacy, I thought—I expected them on a night like this to be more offhand.

  But then, contrary to my earlier suspicions, there was no ceremony to speak of. I was the one who suffered an urgent desire for everyone to begin keening, perhaps to cover some of my own potentially grievous cries.

  I watched the seated dead in the pit, leaning over toward each other, supple shapes still, so recent was their tragedy. No one made a sound. I thought the struggle to strangle my own plaints would choke me. I heard Salim at my side intoning something in Arabic. The artillerists, including the two who had now climbed out of the hole, were moving off so soon to other work. The stretcher bearers were already on their way back toward the operating theaters.

  Amna turned away from the grave and toward Salim and me. If I expected to find tears in her eyes, there were none. She said authoritatively, in her sharp-edged English, “It is certainly time for you to go now.”

  I did not want to—I wanted to wait out the balance of the night on the terrace. I felt irrationally it was a contribution I could make. Salim, however, took me aside and asked for his pills back; so he, too, was dismissing me. He would not have another attack now, he explained gratefully. I’d ensured that by double-feeding him his pills.

  “Your other niece … Amna … she’s very strong,” I told him. “She doesn’t weep at all.”

  “Oh,” he said, “there are reasons why she doesn’t.”

  I wanted to say something further to her, but she stood with her back preventively to me.

  “You may see my son,” said Salim airily, as if the pill had tranquilized him as well as opening his heart. Shaking hands with him had a feel of finality.

  In the moon’s aqueous blue, I went looking for the truck.

  Himbol

  Crossing Himbol’s empty river the next morning, my boots filled with warm sand. It was only eight o’clock, but I felt that the air was already so perilously hot that it would take just one spark of panic from any of our party for it to catch fire. Ahead of us, by the door of a low-slung dry stone house hidden under a network of thorn trees, three women, hair braided and Coptic crosses tattooed on their foreheads, sat on stones. Moka spoke to them but shrugged dismally at their answers and looked away.

  “Jesus H.,” I heard Henry murmur behind me. “The son-of-a-bitch isn’t here either.”

  One of the women called a name, and a young official dressed in jeans and a fawn shirt—a deliberate renunciation, it seemed, of the usual paramilitary uniform of rebel officials—appeared from the doorway of the house and spoke to us in English.

  “But he’s gone on to Senhit province now,” he told us. Senhit was to the west. “He was here but he isn’t here now.”

  We all looked at Christine. She flinched, of course, looked away and then—apparently reconciled to going on—back. The journey from Orotta had been a bruising, unsettling one, and it would not have surprised me if even she showed wilder feelings and cried now or got peevish. I would in fact have welcomed it, since it would have made her a more intelligible companion. But she composed her body. It was now Lady Julia who seemed wan. For in that superheated day, it appeared even more obvious than ever that none of us might be allowed to attend to our own journeys until the reunion had taken place.

  I was promised an interview by the young official who’d spoken to us—from this little dry stone hut he directed the sharing of food among three million Eritreans, and I thought there was a story to that. With this small consolation, I turned back toward the Himbol guest house, a small wooden shed dug into the riverbank and shrouded in foliage. Moka pointed to the shadows under trees.

  “There is the Economic Planning Commission. There is the Department of Public Administration. There is the Department of Agriculture.”

  An open-sided brush shelter stood outside the hut we were all to share. In its shade a small girl, perhaps four or five years of age, waited for us. She was dressed Western style—tracksuit pants and a T-shirt with German writing on it.

  “The daughter of one of the officials,” said Moka.

  In her hand a strange toy hung—it was a live bird, black and yellow, and she held it by a harness of string some adult had made for her. The bird flapped limply and again and again. Its residual tension passed into the child’s arm and somehow soothed her. Moka explained, “The fathers catch them for them.”

  Henry shrugged. A small whimper came from Christine, though. I watched, not quite believing it as she broke away, left the cover of the trees, ran—at a half-lope varying back to a fast walk—wide open to the sun, across the gritty riverbed.

  It was curious the way Lady Julia and Henry and I looked at each other then, as if we were holding an election to choose by barely visible gestures a comforter for this suddenly demented Christine who had at last complained. All the odds said that the task should have been Lady Julia’s. Sisterhood and shared toiletries should have ensured that. Yet somehow, almost instantly, perhaps because of the exhaustion of the others, I was aware of having been elected myself.

  I stepped out of the shade of the trees and made after her. She had reached a clump of African oaks which grew in the middle of the empty riverbed. As I ran after her, strangely delighted to have the t
ask of saving her from Himbol’s excessive light and disappointments, the ferocious air struck me, tumbling over my lips like beads of fire. This Himbol, home of the bird-catching officials of the Economic Planning Commission, etc., etc., was a terrible place, already uninhabitable so early in the day.

  When I arrived beside her, Christine wasn’t making any sound apart from the rasp of her breath. Her mouth was agape and her eyes swept across my face. She looked like one of those scrawny distance runners from some European republic. Then she stared down at the roots of the desert oaks.

  “We will catch up with him,” I said. “He can’t be far off.” Though, of course, he might well be.

  She said nothing.

  “It’s because you’re tired that you feel it’s impossible.”

  My tiredness was certainly the reason I felt it was impossible.

  I reached out my hand to her wrist, but she brushed it aside and began to shiver. We continued to stand in mid-river, among the notional waters and the burning air, and still she wouldn’t answer.

  In the silence I felt a frightening shift in the atmosphere, both a movement and a profound, unnatural vibration in the sky and within my own chest. This is a MIG, I thought, the one I’ve been fearing from the start, and so close that I can’t even hear it. The air grew dense and fell on me like a weight. The impact! I thought. The sky, what I could see of it, was speckled. I was sure combustion was imminent. Christine and I had an instant in which to cling to each other for life, and we did.

  It was locusts, I understood then. I knew it from the wings and antennae beating against the cringing flesh of my face. A plague of them had come down on us. I had, as if seen through snow, an image of a branch by my shoulder stripped of its foliage between blinks of the eye. I didn’t want to watch the obscene voracity, even though I understood it would leave me untouched. Christine had closed her eyes and was hunched in my arms. We fell to our knees and made a tent of ourselves. So—for perhaps ten minutes—we huddled together, while all around the earth was stripped of its last sap. After a little time, as long as I kept my eyes locked shut and held Christine, I felt strangely safe at the heart of all that devouring. Holding Christine, I felt in the simplest way brave and fatherly and sexual at the same time. Hard up against each other we were arrant, fragile, assured survivors. We’d occupied a state where even the day’s heat had become an irrelevance.

  When I looked at last, the air was tranquil and had returned to me like a mother with a clear but ambiguous face. The plague had lifted and vanished. We knelt among bare sticks. Moka was hobbling toward us.

  “All the camouflage has been eaten,” he said. “Come, we must get you into a cave.”

  “I am very stupid, Darcy,” the girl murmured to me.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  Later that day, waking on our air mattresses in a fiery noon in a bunker roofed with logs, we discovered that Masihi was reported to have gone to Jani, a great food dump in Senhit province to the southwest, to film the distribution of aid.

  No one argued about it. We would go to Jani.

  She’b

  At least the chase to Jani after Masihi took us through the valley of She’b, where I could, sooner rather than later, pass the letter I was holding on to Major Fida. I would enjoy a conversation with a man who had intrigued me from the first time I heard his melancholy voice on the BBC.

  I had, of course, heard the numbers of Ethiopian p.o.w.s quoted, not least in Stella’s radio pieces. Yet I was still taken by surprise by the mere sight of the huge population of prisoners of She’b. Before us as we walked in through the narrow neck of a ravine in early morning, the valley was crowded with Ethiopian privates and NCOs. They walked in the open more freely than the Eritreans themselves. I presumed their keepers must have some early warning system against air raid.

  As if to explain the crowd of prisoners and all that movement, Moka told us, wheezing, “It is Thursday. They have no classes on Thursday.”

  He gestured toward the two volleyball games which were in frantic contest on a level patch of dust in a ravine to our left. “An Olympic sport!” he said.

  Some of the players were notably muscular and broad-shouldered—they came from a husky tribe. Others were more characteristically wiry. Quantities of nonplayers sat on rocks at the sides of the valley, writing in booklets made out of brown paper taken from aid packages and stapled with string. Math homework, I discovered, or else Tigrinyan grammar.

  There were no guards visible, though we had seen a few EPLF girls and boys patrolling the outer entrance of the valley, carrying weapons and grammar books.

  Before dawn, the truck which had brought us to Eritrea, the green one with Deutsche Arbeiter Bund written on its side, our truck, rendered familiar with our sweat, had broken its drive shaft. Tecleh, after working on the engine, stood dolefully for a while with pieces of shattered metal in his hands. Then, after covering the truck with brush, he began walking—exactly as he had the night we’d met Lady Julia—back to a camouflaged mechanics shop we had passed some five or six miles earlier.

  Moka told us we were then still miles from the camp at She’b. He led us off south, or more or less so, along the bottom of the valley. He carried the girl’s pack. Occasionally Lady Julia would call on everyone to pause while Christine retched cruelly. She had become ill after the locusts and disappointments of Himbol.

  When the sun rose there were still a few miles left to travel. We stood still, according to the accepted Eritrean wisdom, while an Antonov ground away across the gap in the mountains—so high in its path, though, so languid, that we felt no great threat, no nakedness, but listened instead to Christine Malmédy panting in our wake. By signals I still did not understand, we all knew that now it was Lady Julia who should help her along and hold her by the shoulders.

  In Africa’s erratic way it had rained here, and little ankle-deep pools lay in our path. An Eritrean soldier, the same sharp-eyed, pointedly handsome boy you saw everywhere among the rebels, was washing his shirt in one of the puddles. Soon after, and more remarkably still, we noticed a woman sitting bare-headed on a rock and giving suck to a baby swaddled in a shawl. She called musically and waved to Moka.

  The veteran climbed up to where she was sitting with the baby. He and the woman exchanged a knuckle-wringing handshake—the baby attached to her right nipple prevented the normal full-shouldered Eritrean greetings. After more conversation, Moka waved for us to join him. “It is my friend Askulu,” he called to us.

  We began to climb toward the woman. She’d brought an unexpected air of bounty to the morning. As the baby continued to feed, she extended her right hand to each of us. She wondered would we like breakfast, sweet tea and injera. Lady Julia explained that her friend Christine was too ill to eat. “Oh yes,” said Askulu. “If she does not get better soon, she should take some of our tetracycline.”

  They all said that: “our tetracycline,” as if Dow and Pfizer and Bayer produced a cruder version.

  “Of course,” said Askulu when she heard we were going to the camp. “But the womenfolk should stay with me. Perhaps they do not need to see the Ethiopian men in such quantities. And I have a fine shack here.” She laughed and sat the baby upright, trying to clear its wind.

  “This is my beloved little Beret,” she explained. The baby’s mouth emitted a bubble of milk as the woman began to speak in that voice mothers seem to use universally when they talk on behalf of a speechless baby. “Beret does not like Himbol, with its nasty dust and its heat which gives her a rash. She is happy to be here where the climate is more pleasant. Indeed she is.”

  Askulu tucked and wriggled her breasts back inside her jungle-green shirt, and buttoned it one-handed. Standing, she then led us down a few steps in the mountainside to the standard Eritrean hut half-submerged in stony earth. I noticed a plastic-coated rattan carry-cot sitting on a table made of ammunition cases. Askulu lowered the baby onto a blanket on the table, unfastened its loincloth and began to change it. Singing in
Tigrinyan, she spread Johnson’s Baby Oil on its cherub thighs. I wondered what her source of supply was for that stuff.

  When the child had been put down mewling in its basket and a mosquito net placed over it, Askulu went to sit with the two women where they were, on the clay platform in front of the plates of wheaten bread and the pump thermos of sweetened tea. “Sit down,” she ordered the three of us men, who still stood by the door, hesitant to intrude on the rituals of motherhood. With a sigh she sat down herself beside Lady Julia.

  Lady Julia said, “Of course we’ve met, Madame Askulu. We were on morning television together at the BBC!”

  Askulu laughed delightedly. “But you have changed a little.”

  “I took off some weight,” Lady Julia admitted, making a mouth. I couldn’t imagine her as a plump woman, bereft of her lean authority. I realized I’d seen Askulu, too. During the great famine of ’85 she’d been very visible on all English-speaking television. It developed that she had now been elected to the Central Committee of the rebel movement. Even now, as she attended to her infant in She’b, she was an emissary of the General Secretary, a man called Issayas, a military veteran and an intellectual.

  I knew the name of this nearly invisible leader Issayas. By choice, he remained inaccessible. I hoped that after my return from the ambush I might be able to use my service to the Eritreans as a lever to get an interview with him. His second name was Afewerki. He was believed to be—by such partisans as Stella—the world’s most successful rebel leader. If he made, said Stella, half a gesture toward the world press, ravenous for personalities as much as for news, he would become what she called “an international glamour-puss.”

  Rising from the bench, Askulu looked into the baby cot again to check on the repose of the baby Beret. Her voice softened appropriately as she inspected the child. “The latest rumors are that Issayas once gunned down two Ethiopian judges and poisoned the food of a political rival. I mean the man has been a rebel and engaged in rebel business, never gentle on either side. But I know him. These are the libels of both the Saudi and Israeli secret services. N’est-ce pas, Beret?” She laid a finger interrogatively on her daughter’s cheek.