Amna considered me studiously. It was an unworldly look. It reminded me of Christine. “So your wife left you?”
“Technically,” I said, sweating, “she left me. But in real terms, we left each other.”
“Isn’t it strange that in famine and war there are few marriage problems … apart from death itself and the scattering of lovers over the map. Although some of the Muslim peasant girls who join our forces divorce their husbands first.”
I didn’t know whether to be pleased or not that the chat had so quickly become analytical.
We had agreed to go to a village called Inkema, because there was a poet there, a woman called Mama Xenob. At dawn, when we reached the place ten miles behind the front, we found from people eating their breakfast injera and sipping their tea that Xenob had gone. She was visiting the Sudan, where her reputation for revolutionary verse had recently burgeoned.
We were welcome to look at the other wonder of Inkema, its two-hectare garden. “Jesus,” Henry told me. “We’ve seen enough fucking lentil plots in Nacfa!”
But, of course, we needed to be polite.
The gardener was a middle-aged man wearing a dirty smock and a wool cap. He had a quick whimsical smile. He pointed up to the contour of the hill, in which he’d dug some cunning little channels. From the air, he believed, they looked like mere chance drainage.
Henry refused to take up any of the slack when it came to asking the normal questions expected of a visitor. I asked the man the only one I could think of: whether he came from this place so close to the line to start with, or if he was a refugee.
I heard the expected answers: He was a member of a group displaced from a town called Embahara, three days’ walk away. He told the by now usual stories of massacre and looting. Good ground, he said with typical nostalgia, better than this; granaries full of sorghum to which the enemy set the torch. He could never understand it, for they needed sorghum, too. The smoke rose for three days, and even as the gardener, a bullet in his hip, was carried away by EPLF soldiers who had turned up there after the Ethiopians left, he could see the smoke of burning grain stores.
So this place here, Inkema, was merely Embahara’s shadow.
Then the gardener said something which struck me as less authentic than the rest of the tale. He said that the soldiers of the Dergue had had orders to force the people to learn and speak Amharic, the imperial language. People who refused to learn it, he said, had had their arms cut off.
When we’d left the garden and moved down into the village, I drew level with Amna Nurhussein.
“That story of people having their limbs lopped off?” I asked her. “Surely that’s not the truth? I know the Ethiopians are tough. But cutting off people’s extremities over a matter of language—that seems fanciful to me.”
The other three, including Henry, who was still walking with us, kept a silence. I got the impression I’d been guilty of some sort of gaffe. I listened to our feet clattering on the shards of mountainside.
In fact, it was Henry who surprised me by answering. “They do that,” he said. “It’s in the tradition.”
I was taken by surprise at this new alignment between Moka and Henry. Moka, of course, gave a more expected answer. The Amharas felt outnumbered; even inside Ethiopia they were outnumbered by other races speaking other languages.
I waited for Amna to speak. For some reason I had an idea of her as a reliable witness, less partisan. Moka and Henry were in their ways as questionable as the gardener.
Amna said nothing, however.
At dusk, when the valleys filled with shadow, we headed back for Nacfa. It was a tranquil evening. From the back of the truck, I watched Venus rise. But as we arrived at our bunker, the largest shelling Henry and I had experienced began. Through it the woman from the Public Administration bunker brought our supper as usual. Afterward, in spite of the thunder above ground, Henry took calmly to his air mattress in the bunker’s second room with his diary-journal. Moka wrapped himself in a sheet and lost himself in his novel, which soon fell from his hands. In his sleep he snuffled and wheezed like a man running a race.
I was surprised how remote we all felt from the shelling here, deep under our mound of earth. The barrage outside seemed very nearly nothing to do with us. Once or twice concussions close by seemed to jolt us sideways and bring a momentary blackness into our vision. But I was delighted to be here with the exquisite Amna, desultorily discussing German novelists, my shortwave radio on the table between us, and emerging from it, as part of a BBC shortwave transmission able to be heard only intermittently, a professor from Leeds discussing the desirability or otherwise of one-party systems for African nations.
Without warning Amna said, “You know the gardener?”
“The one I didn’t exactly believe.”
“That one.” She gazed at me levelly. “It is true. I saw the arms of children on the street in Asmara. It happens. I would not invent such a thing, Darcy.”
She chose not to say any more. I was reminded of something Henry had mentioned once—that they don’t relate their personal histories in any intimate way, that they don’t put much stock in the subjective. But if I was to believe her, she would have to give me some such subjective tokens.
I think she understood this—the idea passed between us like a contract.
“I saw you being helped to the clinic in Orotta. Did that have anything to do with language?” I dreaded what I might hear. Perhaps the shelling, the enormous occasional thud outside, made me febrile. It was as if the present Amna remained in this cavern of ours on the strength of just one sinew, which even the memory of evil could snap.
“In some way,” she said dismissively and with that choppy enunciation.
“The bastinado?” I risked asking, naming one of the oldest tortures and one I knew was favored in the Horn. I was trembling, as if I’d uttered an obscenity. I was also frightened that Moka would wake and overhear. I watched the apparently perfect order of her features, the impeccability of the maxilla behind the flesh. Surely, I thought, surely none of this was touched.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s well known that in prison I was luckier than most people.”
“Just the same, your Uncle Salim says that you were tortured.”
“I am here,” she said. “And I can walk. That means things aren’t as bad as my father’s cousin Salim might believe.”
She began cautiously, though, some of her sentences broken into by the strangely intimate, strangely remote row from ground level. She bore me gently along, speaking of family history. I was asked, for example, to imagine the family business, a large Asmara pharmacy, which had been founded by her grandfather in the days of the Italians. In the pattern of Asmara’s worldliness and energetic commerce, her father, too, had gone on measuring out dosages in his dispensary through all the shifts and turmoils. As Amna described it, it was one of those Continental-style apothecary shops, owing more to the Italian influence than to the British. The medicines lay in enormous varnished cabinets bearing labels in Latin shorthand, and a librarian’s ladder on runners put every cure and specific on the highest shelves within the reach of the pharmacist.
I found it easy to envisage those calm, varnished walls where Amna glided along attending to prescriptions, where between the sliding of the ladder in one direction or another, her father might hear of the arrest of the son or daughter of this or that client. The rebel organization in Asmara was called the Committee of Seven. Young nationalists of high school age distributed leaflets for it and wrote little insurgent columns in mimeographed tracts.
Such children suffered the cells of the Gebi barracks, Amna told me. They might be trucked off shackled to Addis or, if things went really wrong, jettisoned dismembered along Asmara’s faubourgs. “There are avenues fringed with palms,” Amna told me. “There are great roundabouts where yellow flowers bloom all the year. A civilized city! But Afan made it mad in this way. Passing traffic was meant to see!”
She explained tha
t her father was a quiet man. He took pains to dissuade his daughter from doing anything flippant enough to land her, trussed up, in a place like Gebi. In high school, though (Amna announced, without seeming to know that the same cliché was uttered in the West), there was a certain fashion to rebellion, to being a member of the old ELF, whose most visible members were certain glamorous intellectuals and various grizzled tough men who had once been NCOs in the Ethiopian or Sudanese armies.
The ELF divided its rebels into five zonal cells, according to racial and religious divisions. Amna’s father, a moderate Muslim, like his cousin Salim Genete down on the coast used to doing business with all kinds—the sort of man who belongs to service clubs, said Amna, because he actually enjoys doing business with all kinds—saw dangers in this. “We will have war zones like China, he told me. And bandit chieftains! I wanted to be a Sierra Maestran, and he knew it. He knew also that he could prevent me from being one, that I would obey him to that extent.”
“Sierra Maestran?” I asked, though I had dimly heard the term from Stella. There were boys and girls who took off with their backpacks to the Ala hills south of Asmara. In revolutionary innocence and in tribute to Fidel, they gave a Cuban name to these hills: the Sierra Maestra.
But though prevented from vanishing into the Sierra Maestra, by the age of sixteen, Amna claimed, she was a runner for an intelligence cell which included schoolteachers and older pupils.
It was the ambushes and other humiliations the Sierra children imposed on the Emperor’s forces on the road south of Asmara that helped bring about the fall of Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah.
“I was very pleased,” said Amna primly. “I had reasons of kinship, of family, to be pleased.” For after the Emperor vanished, the leadership of what emerged as the new government, the Dergue, belonged at first to an Eritrean, General Aman Andom, “a relative by marriage.” Andom knew how bitterly the Eritreans would always contest any foreign possession of Asmara and the highlands. He knew, too, said Amna graphically, the cost of napalm and high explosive—“It is as expensive as gold leaf. If they chose to coat all the highlands with gold leaf, it would be less wasteful than paving them with napalm.”
The Dergue and its young Captain Mengistu had Andom shot dead on his doorstep in Addis for recognizing these Eritrean verities. They believed that with their fresh strategies and Marxist probity they could reduce Eritrea to a province by one firm, sharp move.
I watched Amna demonstrating with her hands the movements of the Dergue against the knapsack-toting kids of Sierra Maestra—one blow from the direction of Massawa on the Red Sea, one from Tessenai to the southwest. But the Eritrean rebels met both. The Ethiopian army was as convincingly repulsed as it had been under the Emperor.
But of course the Ethiopians continued to hold Asmara itself, and on the trams of Asmara sat the composed student and intelligence runner Amna Nurhussein, now a pharmacy student in an unsettled but determined nation.
“What was your main work for the rebels?” I asked her.
“I was not working for the rebels,” she told me with her concisely edged English. “I was a rebel.”
“But your main work?”
“Fraternal work.”
“Fraternal?”
She was aware—“fraternally”—of the other Ethiopian races who had been forced to serve in the tyrant’s army and who had little truck with Amharas, with Addis, or with whatever imperial concept presently possessed it. Together with her physics professor she prepared a weekly newspaper, printed on an illegal Gestetner machine. “Hard news,” she said. “From the home regions of the conscripts.”
I wondered what an Asmaran undergraduate’s concept of “hard” news might be. I also began despite myself to imagine a Frankfurt friend, a British or American journalist, from whom she’d be likely to hear such a term.
Just before her arrest by Afan, the Cubans sent ten thousand regulars to help Mengistu and the Dergue crush Eritrea, and she and her colleagues, chastened, stopped speaking of the Ala hills as Sierra Maestra.
Asmara, she said, had many elegant villas and apartments and looked altogether far more urbane a city than the scattier capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. But Afan, of course, the Ethiopian security police, for the time being set the city’s tone. They raided her parents’ villa one evening at dusk when her parents were themselves out at some social event. She still considers it fortunate that she was home, for it was known that if the suspect was not on the premises, Afan might take other members of the family as replacements.
She had to wait while the police, in the manner of police in more places than Asmara, casually plundered the place, taking the shortwave radio, the recorder, silverware from the dresser; flicking over the titles in her father’s library and confiscating this volume or that.
I noticed she related Western-style, one could say bourgeois details. Such as that one policeman emerged from the parental bedroom with her father’s best suit and three of her mother’s dresses carried over his shoulder. She showed an old-fashioned outrage over that. The business of being a revolutionary had not undermined her sense of a certain holiness in possessions. At some time in the future, I could see by the way she spoke, she wanted her own dresses in her own wardrobe.
While this loot of the clan treasures continued, a young policeman sat at the end of the dining room table, keeping a pistol leveled at her, and with a soft smile continued to refer to her as “a whore from the front!”
After the pillage, she said, she was forced out into the garden and thrown into the back of a Polish Fiat. She was aware of neighbors looking flinchingly from behind the grilles and shutters at their windows.
“I felt a rush of blood and pride up into my head,” she said, placing all her fingers to her forehead. “It’s very important for prisoners to feel that—a sort of pride in being arrested, the one chosen.”
“Pride?” I asked. I could not imagine myself feeling pride at such a moment. Though I did remember then, among the reverberations of the Dergue’s artillery, the prideful graffiti in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw, where after torture and before execution by the SS, partisans had written their forthright scrawls on walls of the cells, brave assertions picked out in and honored by luminous paint these days. Perhaps that was what Amna was talking about: a sort of foreshadowing of that future luminosity the Polish graffitists were sustained by in their last hours.
I had by this stage of my interview with Amna begun to take notes. And pride was the first word I wrote after her name.
They had taken her across the city, to the old Italian cavalry barracks at Gebi her father had warned her about. Even under the Emperor, Gebi had been the interrogation center. There were grand stables, which had been converted into cells, each stall high-sided and dank. The walls threw groans of other prisoners upward till they became diffused and disembodied among the stylized rafters.
She was willing, for the sake of validating what the gardener had said to us earlier in the day, to throw in further details. She was left overnight without food or water. There was nowhere to urinate except the corner of the cell. But her father had old friends from the days of the Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce, before the Dergue put an end to both institutions. The network still existed. There were Eritreans still retaining influence to whom her father could appeal.
Above all, this strange pride remained. The tyrant had shown how much she had hurt him by throwing her into such a hole.
By the next morning thirst troubled her, as they meant it should. There were other instances of what she called in the bunker “indirect means.” They would sometimes lead you along corridors or across small courtyards in which you would see the lolling cadaver of some young Eritrean, hands and eyes bloodily gone. Across a parade ground which must have seen all the exotic uniforms of the Italians, the British, the Emperor’s cavalry, they led her to a colonnaded barracks and down a stairwell. In the basement the air stank and was full of groans and whimpers.
They opened a gr
een door. It seems that the term green door was uttered by both the Ethiopian police and the rebels as a synonym for torture. In the place she now found herself, a large space with a drain running down the middle of the floor as if to collect the run-off of the torment practiced here, she was made to stand to one side and witness the water torture of a male, a member of her cell, a young economist.
She spoke to me not so much of the economist but of the officer in charge of things, a man named Lieutenant Dawit Wolde. Throughout, Wolde occupied a desk in the corner. He had an in-tray and an out-tray, said Amna, just like a normal civil servant. It was unlikely, she says, that this Wolde had any fear of Amnesty International or of the Geneva Conventions, but nonetheless she doubted that Wolde was his real name, suspecting instead that it was some nom de guerre. She set herself to memorize his face and behavior. He was a man of about thirty, often unshaven but always neatly dressed. His manners fascinated Amna. He spoke in a normal, level voice, and though he could get angry, it simply introduced more emphasis into his speech. He never shouted or gesticulated.
Lieutenant Wolde told her in Amharic that the economist had given everything away. They needed her simply for confirmation of some details. “So there’s no bravery left to you,” Lieutenant Dawit Wolde told her with a shy smile.
What made her fearful, she said, was that he seemed to know about her pride. She’d readied herself to suffer like the economist, but she had not prepared herself to be denied heroic chances. The economist’s dulled eyes flashed across her face, and she thought there was accusation in them.
So that was the nature of her torment, to watch water bounce off the economist’s head, again encased in an orange plastic bag. Her cell, the EPLF in general, had devised a sort of tactic: when interrogated, you offered first the names of rebels who had just recently, perhaps in the last week, escaped through the lines or had gone to the Sudan, West Germany, the United States, or England. She named a man called Tesfapaulos.
To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Page 24