To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  Again, I had been able to see, during our conversations, the fine line of her collarbone inside her blouse, and it did seem unlikely that anyone who had been worked over by the torturers could emerge so perfectly. Her elegance, the way she moved most of the time, seemed to bear out her claim that the bastinado was the extent of what she had suffered.

  In Gebi one evening at sunset, the Ethiopians opened the door and threw in among the other women a bloodied girl wearing army shirt and shorts, British-style military gaiters, and plastic sandals. So perfectly was this the Eritrean rebel uniform that the other prisoners might have suspected the girl of being a planted spy if it had not been for an untreated and gaping wound in her left breast. From the wound, said Amna, she and Kidanu spooned the maggots. They washed the injury with dirty cloths and clean water and bandaged it with fragments of unwashed shirt. The chief warden, a Danakil with filed teeth and tribal slashes on his cheeks, saw this crude dressing from the door and ordered the cell unlocked. He screamed accusations at them and asked who had told them they were entitled to treat the wound?

  While one of the turnkeys kept the prisoners covered with a rifle, the Danakil knelt and tore the dressing from the girl’s wound. He carried the bloodied dressings around the cell, checking them against people’s tattered clothing, taking the names of those who had supplied the bandages. Kidanu, of course, became vocal. The inevitable speech of the prisoner they can’t bring down: “We’re as human as you are, maybe more so. Do what you like to us. We’re going to treat that girl.”

  He told her that more bandaging would cost her her life. Yet after he left the cell he clearly wasn’t organized enough to make use of the names he’d collected, and two months later, when Kidanu was taken from the cell and disappeared for good, it was probably the result of a random culling rather than because the Danakil had reported her.

  Before Kidanu was taken away, however, the eighteen-year-old peasant wife gave birth. Children who draw their first breath in prisons, said Amna, never grow up to be ordinary people.

  It was getting late in the evening when we reached this stage of the tale, and the end of the story-cum-interview became sketchy. Her parents had simply bought her out of prison, she said. She said it as if it were a normal expedient of those parents who had the money. All of them, the Nurhussein clan, parents and brothers and sisters, had then passed behind the rebel lines.

  She had not seen Asmara for years. Now, since she’d gone off with the infantry, I wondered if this was the truth and whether she still went to and came from that beloved town in the mountains.

  Frontline Grammar

  Like most cameramen, Masihi would not let anyone else carry his equipment. He had a hard climb of it though, just before dawn, from the valley of Nacfa up to the high ridge the Eritrean trench line followed. The ground was in fact so steep that Moka kept on telling me to hand over my pack to him, though he avoided the same gesture toward Henry, and—frequently desperate for breath—I would say yes and hand the load over to him until breath and shame revived.

  Behind me I could hear Christine gasping for air. But when I made an occasional futile offer to carry her sound gear, she refused. She had taken on her father’s professional standards—the carry-your-own-gear ethic of the camera crew.

  I had for some reason not been surprised to discover from Moka in the small hours that the Frenchman and his daughter would be coming with us. Christine had foreshadowed this the day before at the soccer game. She had said she was or might be going through the lines. It had seemed apparent to me then: If Tessfaha wanted a journalist there, if the Eritrean Relief wanted Henry, then someone must want Masihi to film it.

  “All the way?” I asked. “They’ll go with us the whole way?”

  “I believe it’s so,” said Moka, sounding a little harassed. “I am never told everything!”

  “Then you’re as confused as I am,” I suggested. But he looked at me as if I were a foreigner, which I had forgotten I was.

  Straining up the slope to the front line, we met a string of young soldiers coming lithely down the mountain, carrying plastic jerry cans. They were fetching their sections’ water for the day from a well concealed beside the track. The soldiers levered aside a slab of stone which covered the well. One of them jumped into the hole and stood on a subterranean ledge, reaching up to take water cans, reaching down into the earth to fill them. This was a well the Pintubi of Fryer River would have approved of—it lived separate from the sun.

  They offered us a drink from a powdered-milk can: sweet water with a faintly smoky taste to it. In Fryer River they would have said you could thereby detect the spirits.

  Higher up, we were permitted to make a stop at the little bunker of a signals unit, to eat a bowl of millet porridge for which we had no appetite. Moka rolled his eyes at me and said, “We are soldiers now, who eat to keep up our strengths.”

  Masihi, spread-eagled by the wall, quickly finished his porridge, lay still, and pulled his shawl over his eyes. I could see Christine trying to imitate his gift for grabbing rest wherever it presented itself, but the knack wasn’t native to her yet.

  Soon, with the millet porridge pressing on me like a burden, we climbed the last bends and entered, through a stone doorway in the mountainside, the tail end of the trench system. We were in a deep, cool sap. Beneath a roof of logs and earth to our right, a wide compartment was crowded with soldiers. As my eyes got used to the dimness, I could see that here yet another class was in progress! Third grade science, Moka said.

  Beyond the science class, a slab of light fell along what I suppose is called “a communication trench.” It seemed a scene from the Somme or Gallipoli. Yet the drainage was better and there was no stink either of wet death or excremental mud.

  We passed through the class and stood in the communication sap, which was open to the sky. Occasional low doorways presented themselves in its walls and led away down steps into deep chambers decorated with posters and colored cloth. I surmised these were messes. In each, a number of large bomb casings sat upright on their circular tails and brimmed with drinking water.

  Pointing negligently toward the south, Moka said, “The front line. There.”

  “Where?” asked Christine in a whisper.

  “There,” said her father. “Ten steps away.”

  But we were to rest in one of these mess bunkers. We would not be moving again until night.

  I noticed with a kind of heady amazement that Moka seemed to be addressing everyone. So, almost casually and as if according to an intuitive plan drawn up outside anyone’s conscious knowledge, Henry, Masihi, Christine, and I were all to cross the lines. I was even a little amazed that Amna wasn’t with us, to complete the party.

  We dropped down out of the sap into the mess set aside for us. Panting and looking for an argument, Henry asked Masihi, “Aren’t you going to film the classroom? Education in the goddam front line!”

  Masihi, disposing his gear, sighed. “I’ve got footage. Ai-ai-ai, I have footage! Twelve years’ worth of classes. No one believes it in the West. They think each class I film has been specially staged for the filming. I found out too late in life that the camera is a very inconclusive argument.”

  In this comfortable place underground it was cool and dry. The water in the bomb casings spread its influence calmly over us.

  Henry seemed exhausted. We helped him spread his sleeping bag on a bench and he fell on it. The bunker next door to us, connected to ours by a tunnel, was full of yet another class of infantrymen and -women, this one muscularly chanting English grammar.

  I wondered if Henry wasn’t ill as much as overwhelmed by his surroundings. I was, in any case. We had already had a glimpse of the extent of this trench line. We were acquainted with the fact that it ran for three hundred kilometers. We knew this long scar of trench could be seen from space and was sometimes—so everyone believed—photographed by Russian satellites. But now that we were in the line itself, these concepts had reality for us.


  At last, leaving Henry behind to the heedless grammatic valor of the rebel troops resonating through our bunker, we went outside—just a few paces along the communication sap—and were all at once in the trench line. A bearded officer met us and told us to bend low. Stooping, we came to a long covered stretch where two boys were on watch. The ground of the trench and all the stones that lined it were strewn with cartridges. One of the boys removed a stone from the wall in front of him so that we could see the ribbon of Ethiopian trench sixty yards down the hill. I saw a head—Oromo, Somali, Amharic—rise for an instant above the line of the opposing trench and then disappear. The sight was electric and spun me back down the fire step.

  At Moka’s urging we admired the frequent bays, covered with logs and earth, where infantry caught by shelling could shelter. In one such stretch five soldiers were languidly discussing a map, while one of them, a robust girl of about twenty years, casually changed her shirt and sat bare-breasted on a stone for a time, rubbing her eyes.

  “Here,” said Moka after we’d passed beyond the map party, “you will see both the enemy and the path you will take. But look no more than a second.”

  I raised my head above the parapet for the allowed instant and stretched it to two. I had the impression of seeing clear downhill into the enemy trenches, which seemed almost as deserted as the Eritrean line, as if all the Dergue’s conscripts were under cover. To our left front a road and a river ran south, the riverbed streaked with alkali and largely vacant of water. Closer, perhaps twenty paces from me, unburied and sun-mummied Ethiopian corpses lay in shreds of uniform. Again I dropped back down the parapet, breathless. I felt their terror, the anguish, the scalding loss of breath of stunned conscripts, solidified there on the slope. Full of hope and desperation and madness, they’d been driven this far uphill from their own trenches, and then the Eritreans had ended their surge.

  “We have offered a truce for burying the dead,” Moka told me, wheezing. He seemed to understand that I was outraged. “But the Ethiopians will not acknowledge us. They bury only the officers at the best of times. The ordinary men they leave to the sun and the hyenas.”

  I felt as hostile as Henry. Moka’s relentless tales of Ethiopian unfeeling had begun to weigh on me, too.

  “Is that true?” I challenged. “Is that really true?”

  He did not answer. I raised my head again and looked sideways down the fall line of the trench to a mess of uniform and bone lying on the slope below. I heard Moka mutter, like a rebellious child, “It is of course true, Darcy. Are we barbarians?”

  They pursued, these Eritreans, the ideal of honorable warrior-hood. I couldn’t quite believe it achievable. And yet the trenches were impeccably maintained, as if intended to be the martial face of the Eritrean educational ferment.

  We walked a mile farther along the line in the morning sun, past more English classes and sections of young soldiers on watch. Sometimes Masihi and then Christine would risk another glimpse eastward toward the Red Sea, where the road and the river cut through the Ethiopian line. Christine moved here like a veteran. The jerkiness of limb she’d brought with her to the Sudan was fully gone.

  Through this little tour of ours, it was apparent even to uninitiates like me that the Eritreans had the preferred ground. From high points we saw their line snaking to exploit every contour of the ridge. It would be terrible to be sent to take it, to be an Ethiopian child loaded with your assigned weaponry and kit, arriving out of breath to face the massed English grammar of the Eritreans.

  Behind the ridge, in a low hut out of sight of the Ethiopian line, we met our escorts. We were shown to seats on benches, while the soldiers we had been brought to meet sat loose-limbed on the floor. That’s where Masihi chose to sit too, though he directed his daughter to a bench. Their officer was a gangling man with the gentle eyes of this ferocious region. There was a streak of veteran gray in his hair. He could have been the same man Amna greeted and bumped shoulders with at the football match, but he probably wasn’t. His name was Johanes. I suppose the Greek-speaking early Christians of Egypt brought such names—Petros, Georgis, Paulos, Johanes—to the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

  Johanes kept referring to a smaller man, perhaps a sort of NCO or—I wondered—a political officer. This man knew Masihi well, so perhaps his main task in life was to escort people across into occupied Eritrea. His name was Ismail. He appeared to be about the same age as Johanes, in his early thirties. There were traditional slashes on his face, and he said he came from the lowlands, over in Barka, close to the Sudanese border.

  I found all this out because of the competent English he spoke. While he talked, in a low, authoritative voice, a sort of uneasy glitter entered his eyes—a deep and wary casualness. Masihi drew him out and he told his strange but not atypical story as if only to the Frenchman. Masihi would sometimes put in asides as if Ismail weren’t there.

  At the age of fourteen Ismail had joined up with the ELF. They’d come through the villages of Barka holding seminars in his own language, Barya. He had heard for the first time in his own tongue that there were reasons other than God’s will for death and hunger. The idea, this mother and siren of revolutions, took him by storm and changed him for good.

  He had fought in the end in bloody, fraternal battles between the ELF and EPLF. “These days the Eritreans are a little embarrassed that it happened,” Masihi told us in a loud whisper, as if no rebels were present, as if his own interest in the question was academic. “It was terrible, but sometimes you have to fight to get control of a revolution so that it won’t grow up to be crippled—or maybe become the same beast in different form, another brand of tyranny.”

  Ismail had been wounded during the crazy strife. He admitted as much and casually touched the upper quadrant of his right chest. He didn’t reflect on what would have seemed a pretty massive irony for someone like me: that he was now fighting beside the old enemy. With the mass of ordinary ELF soldiers he had decided some years back to join up with the EPLF on the Hallal Front. I might ponder what extraordinary beasts revolutions were, with their initials and shades of faction. But Ismail didn’t waste words on observations like that. Compared to me, Ismail was brisk with history. Perhaps that was the only way to treat it.

  He did tell me one thing directly, toward the end of the conversation: “Before I’m fifty I expect to see it. The end.” I wondered what he’d do when the time came, when Asmara was entered and the equitable republic proclaimed. And there he would be with nothing but his AK-47 and his memory of a Barka village remoter than the rumor of Egyptian dynasties.

  For he had been a combatant for twenty years.

  Henry had joined us now, and he and I listened avidly when we found out Ismail had been operating behind the lines for the last year. Henry wanted to know whether the rebels held villages in a permanent way, or did they flit in and out? And when they traveled in occupied Eritrea, he asked, did they stick to remoter tracks, or could they travel by vehicle?

  You could travel with your headlights on, he told us, within a few kilometers of some of the garrison towns. He sounded boastful in a muted kind of way.

  Because they could depend only on a certain level of valor from their conscripts, the Ethiopians cleared only those villages where there were no EPLF. Ismail, still speaking mainly to Masihi, went into a comedic routine, explaining in a deliberately deep, over-serious voice how the Ethiopians moved in Eritrea. First they cleared the road with infantry and tanks, a terrible peril to goats. And only after that did the convoy creep along behind. They moved at just sufficient pace to avoid being shot by their officers, but not so fast as to present a banzai image.

  “Did you say banzai?” I asked.

  “They see all those American war movies,” Masihi explained to us, again as if the rebels weren’t actually present. “Someone brings in a generator and video gear, and they watch The Dirty Dozen!”

  A small woman in military fatigues came into the hut. She sat by the door, beside Johanes.
Her hair was cropped and she looked a wiry, competent little woman. She and Masihi greeted each other in an indolent, familiar way with waves of the hands. The two of them had a detailed, genial conversation in Tigrinyan. At last Masihi turned to his daughter and then to us and explained who she was.

  “She’s the medic for our little tour,” Masihi said. “Her name is Genet.”

  We all exchanged nods and waves. For me, of course, she brought into the hut the idea of both potential succor and injury.

  Then Masihi turned to our new paramedic and continued growling and teasing in Tigrinyan. It was a conversation in which we could hear the shared experience, the code of whimsy and injokes.

  I watched Christine, who was herself engrossed in this exchange. She seemed so calmly exhilarated by her father’s Tigrinyan performance with this little rebel paramedic that I began to speculate that perhaps it’s the fathers who stay home who really attract their daughters’ contempt.

  Above all, I tried to imagine her in Paris, wanly holding a small daughter.

  Among the other boys and girls we were meeting now, our escorts, our reliable warriors, was a pleasant-looking twenty-two-year-old who said he was from Danakil, far down in the south. His name was that universal one, Mohammed. The others began to tell us that he was taking an officers’ course—military technique, science, compass map-reading. He let us know that his father spoke English but that his own was halting. In fact, he uttered his well-formed English sentences with exactly the delicacy, that equal weight on each consonant, which reminded me of Amna.

  He, too, like Ismail, had been a guerrilla fish in that sea beyond the front. Tonight or tomorrow night, depending on Henry’s stomach, they would do the trick again, taking us with them. I watched Masihi discussing all this. He wasn’t very fussed about this prospect so unspeakable, indefinable, startling to me, and his daughter—unfussed likewise, since that was her filial duty—sat by him with her hands folded together and locked between her knees.