To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

Tessfaha shook his head. “It is not so much your artwork, Mr. Henry. It is your more sophisticated possessions.”

  I noticed that Tessfaha was reaching over from the stool and pushing certain little black plaques of plastic, as if they were dominoes, around the hut’s small ammunition-box table. He held one firmly with his left hand and extracted from it a silver wand with his right. An aerial. “This is one of Mr. Henry’s high-frequency transmitters,” Tessfaha told me. “Given to him by other parties. When set out on mountaintops by experts, these are capable of conversing in frequency with satellites, of sending them pinpoint bearings. First Jani was bombed, and then the prisoners’ camp. Yes, the camp in She’b has been bombed with heavy loss, reducing the embarrassment the Dergue feels over the Ethiopian prisoners we hold. And as for Jani, Moka tells me that—but for an accident—your party would have been in that area of the food dump at Jani.” He turned back to Henry. “I hope this conveys something of the ordinary, let us say daily duplicity of those who employ you.”

  “Look, friend,” said Henry in his strangest, thinnest voice, “don’t talk about duplicity. I’ve lived with the sons-of-bitches.”

  Again Tessfaha turned and issued an instruction to Ismail and Mohammed, Salim’s son, at the door. They began repacking Henry’s clothing. I noticed that the attention of both Henry and Tessfaha was fixed on the American’s diary-journal, yet they both pretended not to be fussed about it. When Tessfaha casually reached for it, Henry pounced forward on all fours to cover it with his body. Tessfaha pushed him sideways, though, very adroitly and—it seemed to me—without undue force. Henry landed on his side, fetally hunched. Tessfaha took the journal and began to remove its elastic bands.

  A howl came from Henry, part rage and part plaint. He knelt upright to wrench the journal out of Tessfaha’s hands from behind. Tessfaha avoided him by standing up.

  If Tessfaha’s argument was right, if the small black boxes were what he improbably claimed them to be, then I should have been enraged at Henry, who’d been an awkward companion and was now under suspicion of being a treacherous one. All I felt was that Tessfaha was about to commit a sacrilege against Henry’s external soul, his compendium of memories in which I’d never seen him write anything, from which he drew only an occasional old letter or an iconic photograph of his lost girl, Petra, but whose value to him was obviously supreme. His howling now, as Tessfaha removed another elastic band and mementoes began to fall from the mauled pages onto the floor, was pitiable. From the oppressed cities and violated villages of his childhood, Tessfaha must have heard, been familiar with such shrieks. I felt a peculiar anger at him for not recognizing a cry so much more common in his world than in mine.

  I got up from the bed. “Those are Henry’s treasures,” I told Tessfaha. “There’s nothing in there that you need to look at.”

  I believed it then, though later I wondered if the noted-down instructions for deploying the plastic plaques—if you could believe Henry had deployed any—were in there. In any case, Tessfaha removed the last band and prepared carefully, like a man used to reading books whose binding was gone, to open the diary.

  Henry was sobbing, his face already so dirty with dust and tears that he could have been weeping for hours. His cries were terrible, worse cries than a man ought to have to utter, unlikely noises to come from such a tough African honcho.

  I got up from my bed. I was aware I was spitting with anger. I could see the droplets issuing from my mouth.

  “If you open that book,” I told Tessfaha, “I’m finished with you.” I meant it. I had thought the acid test of their revolution was the grammar classes, the food dumps at Jani, the surgical caves in Orotta. But now, I told myself, full of a primitive care for Henry, I didn’t want them if they plundered his little book of mementoes. What I would afterward recognize as astounding was that the Jani scenes, the ones I had been sure would never be forgotten, the strewn wounded blanched with powdered milk, did not at once come to my mind, that I did not bay for Henry to be punished merely on suspicion.

  Then it struck me that my championship of Henry had to do with respect for the size of his act. How could you balance Petra Barre’s release, even if it happened, against the thirty shrouded dead of Jani. Yet Henry had, and there was a size to that. It was all wrong and I should hate and curse him. Yet somehow it reflected well; it was human, it was love.

  “You’re finished with us?” asked Tessfaha. I thought at first there was sarcasm there. But no. The stressed finished wasn’t matched by any mockery in his face.

  “It’s only a few souvenirs of his Somali girl,” I said.

  Henry had stopped weeping and collapsed sideways against the wall, his back to all of us, his face to the corner.

  “Yes,” Tessfaha murmured. “Those Eritreans who invited Mr. Henry to come here should have remembered her.”

  He did the book up again with elastic bands and put it back on Henry’s bench. “Your diary, Mr. Henry,” he murmured.

  Next he reached down from the stool on which he was sitting and fetched first one and then another sketchbook up to table level. He began inspecting the drawings one by one, tearing some pages out, ripping them further into fragments of paper. I still wasn’t appeased, and I didn’t like the cool, omnipotent, enemy-of-culture way he did this.

  Henry, wiping his face, straightened himself, swung his legs off the bed-bench, reached for his journal and stuffed it into his makeshift pillow, and stood up. With a mad suddenness the panic had gone from him. “You can always fucking shoot me,” he told Tessfaha with a sick smile. I looked at him. His journal safely retrieved, he didn’t really care what they did now.

  Still I did not concentrate on the small black plaques on the table and their meaning. I saw Henry instead as a fellow who knows that only a strict and narrow acreage of happiness is allotted, and that it has to be fought for on any terms. On those grounds he was a compatriot.

  Tessfaha, however, began to play with one of the aerials again. “Jani and then the p.o.w. camp. They told you that if you spread your gadgets around the mountaintops, if you made your sketches, they’d let your fiancée go. Ai! It’s all so stupid!”

  “You think so?” asked Henry. He spoke in a strangely muted, explaining voice. “You don’t have to tell me anything about them—whether they’re efficient, whether they couldn’t run a manure factory, etc., etc. I know as much about them as you do. But if they wanted those fucking boxes placed, I was ready to go along with it. I wanted just to put the fucking things down and forget them. I don’t know if they work or not, but it’s my guess they probably don’t. A few sketches and a few little beepers left on mountains. Big fucking emergency! Do you know what the emergency really is? Tessfaha, Moka? You want to hear about the really big emergency? The emergency is that if you guys succeed, you’ll be an embarrassment to Africa. Who wants a setup like yours? There aren’t many governments on this continent that do. There aren’t many governments in Europe. Colored folk who can look after themselves? It isn’t viable. It upsets the world picture. Don’t you know the West has to believe famine’s an act of God? If they believe that, they only have to make a donation. But if they believe it’s an act of bloody politics, they have to really do something, and that’s too, too complicated. So what’s the story? The story is you guys will fall on your own fucking swords, because you’ve got this crazy idea that the world will allow you to be perfect!”

  “We aren’t perfect to start with,” Tessfaha told him, but he was ignored. For Henry was still in midspate.

  “No one wants a perfect world, my friend. All I want is my girl to get an exit visa. That’s the universe goddam perfected, in my book. But your book’s different. I know that. So come on, what in the hell are you going to do with me?”

  Tessfaha sat on the edge of the table. “The Dergue detains your fiancée. But it’s us you hate for that. Maybe you think that if we didn’t create so many problems for the Dergue, your Somali woman would not be in prison and—”

  “S
he isn’t in prison. She’s under house arrest. Pending an exit visa. O.K., if the Ethiopians had a bombing success at She’b, so much the better. They’ll let the poor little bitch go!”

  Tessfaha did not say anything. He looked at Ismail and Mohammed and gave them subtle orders with a slight shift of face and hands. They began packing Henry’s bag again. Salim’s son Mohammed came indoors and fetched the two strewn sketchbooks, tenderly reassembling the drawings and putting them on the table. When everything was in place, he lifted the duffel, brought it to the foot of Henry’s bench, and propped it there.

  “Get your boots on,” Tessfaha told him.

  Henry didn’t obey and remained barefoot. “I admit I flicked the switch on the one I left at the p.o.w. camp,” he said. “Those guys were soldiers and had to take their chances. The one I left in Jani, I broke the aerial off. But they found Jani just the same. I don’t know how they did that. If I was worth anything to them, I’d say they were trying to show me that they can find me anyhow and punish me. But that’s not the case. They’re not so nifty as that. That’s kind of deft barbarity, and they’re barbarians in a dull, relentless sort of way.”

  Tessfaha went, picked up Henry’s boots, handed them to him. “Have you set up one here, in this place?” he asked.

  “No,” Henry said, very casually. “I don’t think they knew I was coming this far.” He didn’t give a damn whether Tessfaha believed him or not. His manner was so reckless now that I felt I had to rush in to corroborate, to give him a suspended sentence. “We’ve been here a week,” I said, exaggerating a little. “Nothing’s happened.”

  While Henry tied the laces of his boots, I started to speak in the same vein as I had in the commandant’s office at She’b. For example, I reminded Tessfaha that I was present as witness. For I could imagine Henry before a severe Eritrean military court. I could imagine them shooting him without too much sentiment, and—in this clearcut struggle of theirs—being justified in doing it.

  Henry cut me off, as I expected he would. “Shut up, Darcy, for Christ’s sake. Who do you fucking think you are? Amnesty International or some other set of faggots?”

  Throughout these exchanges, and while Henry dressed and packed his belongings, Tessfaha went on pondering Henry for a time and then turned and came up to my bench. He stood above me, staring confidentially at the log ceiling. “We may need to send you home, too,” he whispered. “I don’t know what this means …” He gestured toward Henry, who continued to dress with a fake leisureliness, pretty much like a man under arrest. The scene—the little black rectangles, the idea of Henry deploying them, pitiably sneaking to hilltops—all of it seemed fantastical and at the same time banal and fatuous villainy and utter self-immolation, unworthy of belief yet possessed of a sort of gritty probability.

  “What will you do to him?” I asked.

  Tessfaha sat beside me. “We’ll return him to the Sudan. Once in Port Sudan, we won’t want or need to know him anymore. You can verify his good health when you meet him in Khartoum.”

  Henry was packed up now and Moka reached out and, wheezing ironically, lifted the duffel bag. You can let me carry it, his manner said. You’ve got nothing more to hide.

  I stood up and intercepted Henry before he got to the door. Contradictorily, I didn’t feel like shaking his hand.

  “Sorry, matey,” he told me, winking. “If I get unlucky with stray Eritrean fire, you can tell the world what happened. If you like. I don’t give a damn.”

  “You won’t get any more unlucky than you already are,” called Tessfaha, who was still standing by my bench. “You should continue to take your malaria pills and expect a long life.”

  “And long memories, I suppose.”

  “Exactly,” Tessfaha murmured.

  “To hell with the lot of you,” said Henry, and stepped out into the daylight. I heard him being walked away. I could hear Moka’s steps, too, the gait thrown off by the weight of the duffel.

  Sometime very soon, I became convinced as the party disappeared through the village, they would tell him Petra Barre was dead. They might even be able to evince witnesses, agents from Addis, say. Documents? Less likely. But that would be their summary punishment. After that, they would have no cause to shoot him.

  I was still so astonished by the substance of Henry’s crime that I barely remembered it might have practical results for us, for Tessfaha and me.

  “The ambush is canceled then?” I managed to ask Tessfaha after Henry had vanished.

  “Perhaps … though he doesn’t seem a very energetic agent. But he may be in contact with some other representative of the Dergue.”

  “I don’t think you should call Henry an agent,” I protested. I didn’t want terms like agent and representative of the Dergue used in front of some Eritrean military court.

  Tessfaha shrugged. “I don’t quite know what other term to use. And as for his possible contacts, you’ve seen the people come and go here. The area around the village is full of wheat militiamen, supposedly loyal to the Dergue, apparently loyal to us. There are no hard margins of loyalty, though, and no doubt the Dergue may have a claim on some of them—as it does on Henry himself.” He looked extremely depressed for a time. “About the business of the convoy, Darcy, I don’t know. What do you think? Would you still go?”

  I said I would, though it was in some ways the promise I least wanted to make. For one thing, I wanted time to reflect on the nature of Henry’s business with the little electronic plaques. I believed there were enormous questions to be asked. Nodding briskly, though, Tessfaha got up from the bench to go.

  “You’ll be lonely here,” he said. “But tonight you can drink with Masihi.” His eyes were nearly closed as he spoke. He seemed a little distracted. Then they sprang open. “You know, Henry’s girl is dead, or wishes she was.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I’m sure about the Dergue,” he said. “Those devices they gave him … they’re playing with him. Certainly those little things give off some sort of signal, but the technology is shaky. God knows if they had a part in what happened. But that question isn’t necessarily meaningful to them, to the ones who decided to employ Henry. Using people, that’s what they find meaningful. A hundred years ago they would have sent him in with amulets designed to bring on drought and plagues!”

  He yawned and stretched, as if he’d been up all night. So he probably had, traveling.

  “Perhaps someone should tell him that his woman has no hope. He is a barbarian if ever I saw one. But to some people he would be a hero, I suppose. Selling p.o.w.s for love, I imagine he calls it. A romantic in the truest sense! A sentimentalist. When you see him in Khartoum, he’ll probably have a picture of the two of you on his office wall.”

  The colonel left me to a desolate day. I slept in a slick of sweat and woke from a dream of Henry and a court-martial to find that the noise which had interrupted the dream was the yapping of one of the pert vermilion lizards who lived in the thatch of the roof. I thought, Tonight, unless she’s moved again, I’ll see Amna. But I couldn’t look forward unambiguously to that. It wasn’t only because in last night’s sewa exuberance I’d embarrassed myself and her. It was a lack of daring in me. And Henry had had it—the terrible Henry, the man whose gestures you couldn’t predict. His massive intentions toward the Eritreans had misshapen his character, twisted him to madness and sickness. But he had daring. And if it was true, as Tessfaha said, that Henry would have a picture of us both on his office wall, that itself was madness. There wasn’t any warmth between us to justify a picture. And yet he had daring, and that seemed the most significant thing to me.

  And I returned to the vast fact: Henry being willing not only to sell villages and prisoners by the valleyful, but also to put himself in a position where no one, himself included, could be certain he’d actually done it, the technology being—as Tessfaha said—unreliable.

  I somehow wanted that degree of venturousness. I actually felt chastened not to have
it. And I felt desperate, since its lack accounted for the loss of Bernadette—accounted, too, for my helplessness with Amna. A better man than Henry, of course! A man who had risked no one, especially not himself.

  Henry wouldn’t have lost Bernadette, I assured myself. Henry wouldn’t have behaved judiciously, wouldn’t have balanced love and vengeance as, in the pattern of my bank manager father, I had.

  All that day in the village near Asmara I rehearsed the disconnected scenes of my morally impeccable and wise search for Bernadette. How I had gone to so much trouble, but never the right kind!

  I can scarcely remember the Darcy of the day after Bernadette vanished. I suppose a little shock was justified. I remember Freddy Numati, the Pitjantjara elder, reassuring me on the question of whether Burraptiti might misuse her in some way and leave her beside the road without water.

  That was in a way the reassurance I wanted. For the moment, I was looking for reasons not to go straight off in pursuit. For Bernadette to run away with Burraptiti was, I told myself, a temporary act of vengeance against the tribal council and against me. I thought it almost too stupid and foolish to be taken seriously. She was trying to make me believe she and Burraptiti were lovers. But I was sure they hadn’t been—not in Fryer River anyhow—though I couldn’t swear to what was happening now.

  On that matter, it wasn’t just the hubris of a bad husband that made me believe Burraptiti and Bernadette weren’t in some sort of affair. The nature of the fight between us, between Bernadette and the council, the whole balance of behavior would have been different, that’s all, if Burraptiti had been an early element in it.

  As vengeance anyhow, her escape worked well. In a way, I let it work well. Perhaps I wanted to be able to go to her and say, “Look, you made me give up the best job I’ve ever had.”

  To describe the decline briefly, I found my credit had gone in the eyes of the tribal men. Questions to do with land title, petrol-sniffing, police liaison were not brought to me any more.