To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  “Mr. Darcy,” he said.

  I nodded. As he smiled at me I tried to convey wariness and strict professional standards.

  “You are a friend of my friend Stella?”

  “Stella Harries. Yes. I am a friend.”

  I thought he was going to base an appeal for trust on our mutual friendship: Give me Fida’s letter, because no friend of Stella’s could be a barbarian! Later I was a little astounded that I had not known straightaway that this was Fida himself. And now he introduced himself, and I recognized him at once from Stella’s photograph, recognized even his voice from the tapes she had made.

  The three of us sat down. Tea was brought now and drunk. I put the letters beside his cup. “There is something from Stella, and a longer letter from your wife. I suppose that’s the more important one.”

  He behaved like what they used to call “a man of breeding.” He did not tear open the envelopes and devour what lay inside. He glanced at them almost as if they were ambiguous, like examination results or a medical report. He would save them to read in privacy.

  He smiled at me. “And the book?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Another American.” He did turn that over, read the quotes on the back cover, went searching for details of the author in the first couple of pages. “I shall be an expert in American writers when poor Ethiopia alters its allegiance and falls in again with the Americans …”

  Moka growled. “They say on the African news of the BBC that the Russians might throw the Ethiopians out of bed—not the other way around. The Russians are so tired of Mengistu!”

  “Ai, yes,” said the major.

  I had my mouth open to ask the question: Why was he, a p.o.w., on this side of the lines? But he turned to me and began talking before I could begin. “I insisted on seeing you, Mr. Darcy. I was in a position where I could do that. But we all hope that you won’t say you met me here. The Eritreans hope that, and so do I. Not even to tell Stella. I trust you don’t mind that?”

  I gave them both my assurances. Moka wheezed joyously once I’d uttered them.

  Fida rose and went across the room to where a burlap bag lay in the corner. He took from it a letter of his own, brought it back, and placed it on the table in front of me. “That is a letter for my wife. If I go to God in the next week or two, you’ll hear of it, and you’ll send the letter to that West German address on the envelope, and they will get it to her.”

  “What does go to God mean?” I asked him. “Are you under some sort of sentence?”

  For there were rumors that the Eritrean military dealt with offences fairly summarily. In a confused way I wondered, Had he been condemned by one of their military courts?

  He raised a hand. “No, it isn’t anything like that. My fellow prisoner, my cellmate you could call him—Captain Berezhani, whom Stella met—may have thought he was under sentence, for he hanged himself six weeks past. He gave way to the purest despair and condemned himself. That, too, is in strictest confidence, since Berezhani’s family are Christian and would be demented to find the poor fellow had done that. But me? No, I am not under sentence. But I am sure you don’t have to be told the whole situation here is dangerous. Not for you, of course. But I am already out of the zone where prisoners are normally kept; I am already back in my own zone, the occupied one. So by all means use your imagination now or afterward, but say nothing.

  “This letter, though … if you have heard nothing one way or another about me by the time you leave Eritrea, then there will be no need for you to send it, and you can tear it up.”

  “Literally?” I asked. “Rip it to pieces?”

  “Please do. It is just that certain motivations of mine might worry my wife if I am not present on earth to explain them to her.” (I noticed how theological his English was: Go to God had now been followed by the oddity of present on earth.) “I needed to meet someone of whom I could say with certainty, he will post the letter. He will not decide that it is unwise or inexpedient to post it, as perhaps one of my captors might. He will post it.”

  “But how will I know whether to post it or rip it up?”

  “If I go to God, it will be well known in this region. The cameraman will tell you, for example. It may … well, let us say it will be news.”

  He reached across and put his hands on top of mine.

  “I thank you for your service to me.”

  I had an urge to ask him about Tessfaha’s proposed ambush—was he engaged in that in some way? But I knew I wouldn’t get a proper answer, so instead I let a normal conversation start. We talked about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and about the meaning of perestroika and glasnost. We talked about the Poles. He listened to me speak of crime and homelessness in New York. Like everyone who has been to that city for a week or two, I was expert on that. I can’t remember how it came up, but he showed me his arm, the one which had been broken when he ejected. He put it through some basic exercises and praised the pin job the Eritrean surgeons had done.

  By certain subtle gestures of command, he ended the interview when he was ready, a man accustomed to authority. It was the way that, during my limited journalistic career, I had seen politicians dismiss the press. That didn’t mean that at the end he didn’t express his gratitude to me a little fulsomely, at least by Western standards.

  “I won’t be seeing you again while we’re here,” I said, almost as a statement of fact.

  “I regret that,” he said mysteriously.

  Outside, the bite of the sun penetrated the fabric of my shirt. It seemed hard to stay upright under the heat’s gravity. I passed back gratefully into the hut I shared with Henry and hid the major’s letter away in the same nest of squalid clothing from which I had taken the one from his wife.

  Kirir Music

  I had not during my wait in this town forgotten Amna Nurhussein in the least. Her casual goodbye on the afternoon of the game of football still caused me some bemusement. My mind returned habitually to it. I liked to think I was very wary about taking these impulses of memory at their own self-declared value. Again, Bernadette and the Pitjantjara and Pintubi tribes as a group had educated me pretty adequately on the limits of the sort of enthusiasm I felt for Amna. In Fryer River I had chosen to be happy just because I was besotted by elder-magic, by Panitjilda and its mystery rites and the embargos it put on people’s sight. I’d thought that because I was passionate about something as alien to me as the tribal cosmos, everything would be forgiven me.

  Believing I was twice shy these days, I’d tried when I remembered to fight the charm of the rebels, or at least have doubts about it. But while we waited for Tessfaha’s word, I found myself making arguments for some sort of friendship with Amna. Masihi had managed it. Having done badly as a husband, he had found his femme particulìere in the Eritrean mountains.

  Sometimes I even went so far as to consider that, if you had to be a revolutionary to love a revolutionary, then I’d stay here, take a job teaching in one of their bunker schools, or write English textbooks for the Department of Information. I would be a noncinematic Masihi. I’d drink sewa and eat injera in Orotta’s bitter valleys, and so I’d qualify!

  But in the day’s withering light, I knew that wasn’t a possibility. I wouldn’t convince myself, I wouldn’t convince the EPLF. Certainly, I wouldn’t convince Amna Nurhussein. It would be like my efforts to be counted in among the brotherhood of the Pitjantjara holy places, that time I went off with Freddy Numati and the young anthropologist, mapping the mysteries. The Pitjantjara had been polite to me, and the Eritreans would be similarly polite. But it didn’t mean for a second that you occupied the same earth.

  Then, I thought, I could go to Frankfurt—as soon as I had the fare—and I would have it if I could make something out of my Eritrean notes. And then when she returned there, I could pay a proper, sustained, righteous, impeccable courtship, one which wouldn’t offend her old-fashioned revolutionary sensibility.

  That project, too, seemed real only in cert
ain lights. I was again too well educated by the masters of Panitjilda to believe it. I was aware of and defeated by everything that was mysterious in Amna—mysterious in the sense of being African, of having been proud in prison, of having known the bastinado and witnessed the electrodes. Again, I lacked grounds and qualifications to commune with her.

  Just the same, the longer Tessfaha failed to show up, the more febrile I got about Amna, and the more these banal and—in their way—fully realized scenes flickered across my overheated brain.

  The night of the day I’d met Fida, I was sitting on a stone by a bonfire among a crowd of soldiery who included the medic Genet, the officer Johanes, the veteran Ismail from Barka, the officer-trainee Mohammed, when the fantasy seemed to take flesh.

  Henry had come to like these evening events and to get a taste for sewa. By morning, when I woke near him, I could always smell the sourmash exhalations the digested liquor gave off through his pores and on his breath. For the sake of fraternity and to soothe the boredom of our long days in the hut, I’d begun heavy evening drinking, too. Once my blood alcohol achieved the right level for folly, I would find myself letting my eyes skim round the edges of the fire, searching the features of the infantrywomen, looking for echoes of Amna’s.

  That night I did see a woman—turbanned in the style of Amna, the tail of the turban hanging so that it could be used to cover nose and mouth against dust—sitting between a veteran of about thirty-five years and a very young woman perhaps no more than nineteen or twenty. I spent a long time looking at this woman with the turban, gauging the value of my Frankfurt, Amna-courting fantasies against the Amna-image on the edge of the fire.

  Masihi meanwhile attempted to enliven the evening. He talked the Eritreans into producing musical instruments—pipes, the guitarlike instrument called a kirir, and a harmonica or two. Dancing soon began; I found myself on my feet, gyrating as well as I could to music of surpassing strangeness. I saw spinning past me by firelight the scarred features of nomads and goatherds rendered political by some act of savagery, nameless and unrecorded to everyone but them. I saw the smooth-shaven faces of the town-bred intellectuals like Mohammed, who now lived in holes in the earth. I saw Christine Malmédy with her right arm slung around the shoulders of a veteran—Ismail, I think, the former soldier of the ELF. Her mouth was avidly, uncharacteristically parted and she seemed ecstatic. A dancing woman. A woman who might even take a lover among the warriors.

  Here in this village she and her father had been filming interviews with soldiers and villagers every day—they did not have lights for indoor work, but they had placed a chair and fixed the camera and the sound gear in position under a wide-spreading thorn tree. Technically, these were challenging enough conditions to rule out intimate conversation between father and daughter and the sort of uncomfortable hours of proximity which Henry and I spent together. But if distracting Christine was Masihi’s only tactic, it seemed to satisfy both of them.

  Very few soldiers sat out of the dance that night, but I noticed after a time, when I was dancing myself—somehow, and without any feeling in my legs—that the woman in the turban who looked like Amna stayed seated on her slab of stone. Occasionally she smiled the Amna smile, but you came across that particular form of the divine rictus in many of the Eritrean rebels. What, according to my drunken logic, convinced me joyously that it was Amna was that this woman stayed fixed to her rock when absolutely everyone else had risen. The Ethiopian bastinado in her past had, of course, made dancing unwise or impossible now.

  I disengaged from the circle of dancers. When I reached Amna I dropped on my knees in front of her. I was astounded at myself, but also delighted. I thought, You’ve become a wild man, Darcy. At last! The sewa, which is informally brewed, more potent in some batches than in others and fiercer when made from rice, as was the stuff we were drinking now, had done all that for me, made me unfamiliar to myself.

  I said, “You were supposed to be visiting friends in Nacfa.”

  She gave her complicated smile. “I visited friends in Nacfa. Now I am here.”

  I imagined her walking through the lines on ankles which could suddenly bloat again and turn on her. “You shouldn’t be here. What if you got sick?”

  “What if you got sick?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t ever a prisoner of Afan. You’re a great worry to me, Amna.”

  “Why is that?” she asked, each word separate as an artifact.

  “Because I don’t bloody well know where to fit you. Here or there, I mean. If I came to Frankfurt, for example, would you let me take you to dinner?”

  “You could come to dinner at our apartment. Injera and lentils.” The idea made her laugh.

  “Your apartment?” I felt that this was progress.

  “We live in two apartments. One is the office and the other is our living quarters.”

  “Listen, Amna, I don’t want to have dinner with the whole bloody EPLF Frankfurt branch. And I certainly don’t want to eat bloody injera, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. And as for sewa, I don’t care if I never see any more, even if it is a drink of heroic stature. I want to eat and drink something sensual, like pork knuckles and beer, spätzle and Moselle. Then I want to go to the movies with you. If you’ll eat pork knuckles with me, I’ll even sit through a Wim Wenders movie, which is my criterion of true friendship. And even if it might be a bit unrevolutionary of me, I want to be your friend.”

  “I am a Muslim woman by culture still and have never eaten pork. Besides, you are my friend already, Darcy.” She said it in that universally infuriating, ambiguous manner of impossibly desired women. That, I acknowledged, crossed the culture line. That was standard from Lapland to Tasmania.

  “Come off it, Miss Nurhussein. Fraulein Nurhussein. You know what I bloody well mean!”

  I knew that I was getting what used to be called “importunate” and, scared of the results of that, to prevent myself from going further, I stood up. “I am coming to Frankfurt to eat blood sausage with you. To go to patisseries for Vienna coffee and disgusting big Bavarian tortes. Cream will come gushing out of our mouths.”

  She was still smiling. “That sounds very enjoyable,” she told me.

  “Believe me, Fraulein Nurhussein, it bloody well will be. Believe me.”

  The officer-trainee Mohammed came spinning out of the dance and landed on his knees in front of Amna. He slapped her wrist familiarly.

  “This is my cousin,” Amna explained.

  “Everyone’s your cousin. Salim was your cousin.”

  “This is Salim’s son.”

  I stared at the boy and saw Salim’s features. “Your father is waiting in Orotta,” I said. I remembered Salim’s panic about heart tablets.

  “I will be allowed,” said the boy in painful English, “to go to my father after this.”

  There was Salim, on the sentimental screen in my head, praying on the mat with the compass sewn into its hem.

  Amna and her cousin began to speak in Tigrinyan. I stumbled away to my hut, uncertain about what had been achieved. I believed I could hear her laughing—without any definable cruelty—behind my back. Only when I was lying queasily on my air mattress did I begin to wonder why she was here at all, whether she, too, had been co-opted or had by stubbornness forced herself into the party to be another witness to Tessfaha’s proposed attack on an aid convoy.

  Little Black Boxes

  In that village the goats were scrawny but always more or less vocal. They were noisy above all early in the morning and generally woke us. But before the first bleat or cluck was heard the next day, I was awakened not by the animals but by intense, hushed discussions inside the hut. These augmented the alcoholic bewilderment—where am I and what have I done to cause this stale anxiety I feel?—as my brain pulsed and stretched for the first daily crumbs of place and time, the familiar mercies which show a person that he is leading a sequential life and is not in hell.

  Once that was settled, I looked out from th
e bench I slept on. I could see that just beyond the doorway, under the eaves, the soldiers Mohammed and Ismail knelt by Henry’s giant duffel bag and its strewn contents. Moka stood inside, looking out, mournfully regarding the mess which had been made of Henry’s effects. Dolorously, he watched Ismail pick this or that item out of the mess of clothing and possessions and bring it inside for inspection by a tall man who sat on one of our stools near the foot of Henry’s sleeping bench. Sketchbooks and small notebooks were delivered in this way. I noticed, however, that Henry’s beloved diary, with its memories retained inside it still with elastic bands, lay on his sleeping bench within reach of his hand, but also within reach—at a stretch—of the tall man. The tall man on the stool was Tessfaha, whom I had last seen in an Eritrean restaurant in London and had yearned to see frequently since.

  By the small bag stuffed with clothing which he used as a pillow, Henry himself sat barefoot, both feet still up on his air mattress.

  I levered myself upright and began putting on my boots—I don’t know why. To signify my willingness to defend my friend, be prepared to go to the convoy perhaps, to show my suitability for that sort of journey. I believed I’d said stupid things to Amna, things which might have disqualified me from being taken seriously. At the same time I felt that Henry needed support in the face of these ransacking rebels.

  Tessfaha turned to me and said familiarly, as if he’d been with me for weeks past, “Mr. Darcy, please do not concern yourself. Your property is sacred to us.”

  I noticed some already inspected sketchbooks of Henry’s strewn across the floor. The same nonsense as at the commandant’s office in She’b. I looked to Henry, willing to urge him to rebel, promising him solidarity. But he merely winked at me.

  “They’re back to thinking my artwork is dangerous,” he told me in that brittle voice. His eyes bulged and were too bright for the morning after the night we’d both had. “Just like that prick at the prison camp.”