To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

by Thomas Keneally

  Fida later indicated to Stella Harries that a ten-minute skirmish raged, during which the convoy’s armed escorts, confused, far from home and—as Darcy would have it—“lacking in grammar lessons,” fired in panic at the surrounding rebels and then surrendered to them. The marching of prisoners back through the lines would begin that very evening, the Eritreans again apparently proving themselves scrupulous in this matter of prisoners, even though, in a season of famine, the captives took injera which might better go to Eritrean peasants.

  The convoy’s papers had been captured intact along with its commanding officer. Fida, employing the aristocratic Amharic authority which was his second nature, interviewed the commander and then, that night, made use of the documents to lead Tessfaha and the trucks laden with rebels on through the three rings of security the Ethiopians had put around the military airport of Asmara. He would report that this was shamefully easy, for he was helped by the not unreasonable Ethiopian belief that no force would try to strike Asmara airport, especially given the security measures which had been taken. But of course, as Fida remarks, security measures could be a narcotic.

  He remembers rolling—at the head of the line of trucks—past these three mounds, each of them defended by anti-tank and machine guns, behind which young Ethiopians talked, passed cigarettes, and listened to radio music.

  Tessfaha had hoped that, again lulled by their new measure of security, the Ethiopians would have parked or hangared their squadrons of MIGs and Antonovs close together. He was delighted to find that it was so—four squadrons distributed around the northwest perimeter of the airfield, close to the officers’ mess where Fida himself had lived for a time. So that no one could approach them by stealth, they were bathed in bright yellow light. Some of them were fueled and armed for their missions the next day.

  Fida simply took up a position on the edge of the tarmac with Tessfaha—“directing traffic,” he would later call it. “There are the Antonov hangars, there is the fuel dump, there is the rocket store, down there, that bunker second on the left.”

  It was all so quick, so stunningly loud and complete. Within five minutes more than forty MIGs were burning or had exploded on the airport apron. The fire and the column of smoke could be seen from Eritrean positions thirty miles away. Everyone moved automatically, Fida said, bludgeoned by the sound. He noticed some of the Eritreans fall and abstractly surmised that there must be firing from the officers’ or soldiers’ messes.

  At a point when Fida had finished his traffic controlling and the further execution of the damage was in the hands of the rebels themselves, Fida led Tessfaha to the barracks, to the officers’ quarters on the top floor. Their objective was the large bay at the end where the Russian military advisers stayed while in camp. Tessfaha and Fida were escorted and protected by a small body of young EPLF soldiers. These men and women fought a swift, terrible engagement with armed officers in the bar halfway along this landing. During it, Tessfaha pinned Fida to the outer wall, shielding him or perhaps stopping him from mediating. Fida trembled and protested as pilots he probably knew perished in there. But he understood no protest was feasible. He had—beforehand—believed that casualties would be on the Eritrean side and that the likely Ethiopian casualty would be himself.

  Fida had looked forward to taking prisoner the squadron military advisers he had known—he had named them prosaically by their first names: a colonel named Oleg, a captain named Alexander, a lieutenant named Sergei. If one of them were out in the town, at least two of them should be in the base. But, after the shambles in the bar, Fida’s Eritrean escort broke down one locked bedroom door and then another, finding both rooms empty. A third proved equally empty. It seemed sad to Fida, but not absolutely improbable, that all three officers should be in the city dining and drinking with the Soviet engineers of all stripes who lived in Eritrea.

  To be thorough, the rebels broke down a fourth door. There was a shot from within which hit the wooden door jamb and bounced off it into Tessfaha’s body. Fida presumed Tessfaha’s injury was minor, a few wood splinters. In fact, the inventive Eritrean rebel would fall dead from the wound within seconds.

  For his two large plans for that night he would posthumously attract frank criticism from his colleagues in the EPLF, for the fact that he went perhaps unnecessarily to Asmara himself, for the way the food convoy ambush involving Darcy and Masihi and the rest turned out. The random Russian shot from within that fourth room delivered him from having to explain himself.

  Fida entered, passing Tessfaha as he staggered, and turned the light on. If the shot had come from an officer he knew, he could pacify and reassure the man. But the young man he saw standing by a bed was an absolute stranger, brown-haired, freckled, very thin. There was a bottle of vodka and a drained glass on a table in front of him, as if he had been having a nostalgic Slavic time, downing liquor in the dark. He had a Russian pistol in his hand.

  Fida prepared himself to utter something soothing, but in the instant his mouth opened and before a word could emerge the young man sat on the bed and toppled sideways onto the pillow.

  So that was it. The poor boy, believing too well the Dergue’s stories about the rebels, about the way they tortured and dismembered prisoners, had taken his poison pill. With him perished, Fida can remember having thought irrationally among all the noise, an encyclopedic knowledge of the MIG-23 and all its ways.

  By all accounts of this astoundingly effective strike, the Eritreans simply drove out of Asmara airport again, taking Tessfaha’s body with them to save it from mutilation. Fida noticed that the guns at the third and second mounds had been silenced and the guard box was empty. Telephone lines had been cut and false messages had been broadcast throughout the city to police and army units.

  Once beyond the airport itself, Fida was able therefore to talk the convoy through two city checkpoints and out into the open country.

  The figures—the accounting if you like, for this Eritrean ploy—are well established now. Reputable articles have appeared on the subject. The more than forty MIG jets and three Antonovs destroyed that night must have cost the Dergue some three quarters of a billion dollars. The economic and military aspects of the Eritrean attack were so egregious that they were reported as an item in the BBC African News, and throughout Eritrea people in bunkers listened, celebrated with sewa, and felt safer.

  Two months ago, Major Fida’s wife was able to leave Ethiopia due to the special kindness of certain influential West German officials and politicians who were friendly to Eritrea. She lives in Munich, and there is a rumor that her husband will soon be permitted to leave the prison camp in the valley of She’b and join her there.

  Darcy’s Last Word: Leave It All For Frankfurt

  On the way down to the old Italian road after dark, I kept—like Christine—close to the experienced presence of Masihi. In Jani I had once felt profoundly lost in Africa, but now I walked at the bottom of the sea which had once, a pulse of time ago, two hundred million years gone, used these mountains as shoals and nurseries.

  It was impossible in that dark, moving column to see Amna, but I had no illusions about her falling out and staying in shelter. Why should she? She was traveling homeward, toward holy Asmara, while I was awash in the alien and at a loss. Her homecoming was my exotic journalistic experience. I kept advising myself to leave it all for Frankfurt, where we’d be, if not exactly on my home ground, a damn sight closer to it. But I couldn’t avoid the suspicion that some other wild option, an option of daring, was open to me.

  We were in place above the road by midnight. Johanes first inspected and then pointed out to Masihi and Christine and me some ground in a nest of boulders. He spread rugs there, which one of these soldiers must have had to carry here. Christine and I opened up our sleeping bags on top of the rugs. It was a warm night, and we lay together with our boots on, looking up into a limitless pit of stars.

  “Are you well, Darcy?” asked Christine Malmédy, flagrantly well herself, waggling her sho
ulders and her hips, confidently working the earth beneath the rugs and the sleeping bags into something like her own contours, her new home.

  Without grounds, I said I was well.

  “And Miss Nurhussein has appeared again,” she said archly, and I almost heard her laughing.

  I went to answer but then found she had turned on her side and seemed very soon to be asleep. In her father’s mansion! Among the hard stones of Eritrea.

  Masihi and I were left to deal with our insomnia. I could hear him sighing a great deal.

  At last he said, “Darcy?”

  I was astonished by his percipience. “How did you know I was awake?” I asked.

  He did not answer that. “I think I should say something to you about Amna. In the spirit of what you would call fraternity.”

  “Oh yes?”

  I was, of course, avidly awake now.

  “I can recognize what is happening. I have been on that ground before you,” he said solemnly. He swallowed rowdily. “I have been enchanted, too, by Ms. Amna Nurhussein.”

  My face prickled in the dark. “Am I as obvious as that?” I asked.

  “Only when you have had too much sewa,” he conceded. “It is too cruel. In the first place, she is an obsessed woman. And in the second, she is a cripple who does not appear to be one. On neither of those grounds is either of us fit to mix with her.”

  “She doesn’t strike me as a cripple.”

  “No,” murmured Masihi. “The will, you see. Stubbornness, of which she has a plentiful supply, my friend. But you have to realize everything has been done to her! Everything, I repeat. Everything they could think of. Afan. The Dergue.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” I protested. “She told me herself. She suffered the bastinado. But otherwise she was a witness. You know, to the torture of others.”

  “The bastinado is not a picnic,” he said, yawning. “But in any case, what she told you is in the usual Eritrean spirit. If you wrote about her torture, she would feel embarrassed in front of her peers, her brothers and sisters.” He made a sudden, dry noise of grieving in his throat. “They did everything to her, Darcy. Everything you could imagine.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said in a panic, “what they’ve done to her. It doesn’t diminish her in my eyes.”

  “No. Do you know, I tried to marry her! But we to whom nothing has happened have no common conversation with people like her. They did everything to her. She cannot weep because they crushed her tear ducts with a circle of rope.”

  “With knots tied in it?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Salim Genete had said something about that. The night his niece had died. There were reasons, he’d said, Amna couldn’t cry.

  “They did everything to her,” said Masihi.

  I was getting petulant at this repetition. “You keep saying that,” I complained.

  “Not even I,” he told me, “know everything that was done. God knows what unnameable things! But about the nameable ones, I can tell you.”

  And he started to do it. She had suffered electric shocks. She had been stretched across a stone, four-cornered and immutable, with ropes. They had destroyed her womb that way. She could not have children and so she considered herself a woman more in a political sense, said Masihi, than any other. All her teeth had been pulled, and all her nails. There were burns everywhere on her body. Decency, said Masihi, prevented everyone except the surgeons she went to these days, and maybe her Frankfurt physiotherapist, from knowing the extent of her violation. However, she had been to extreme limits.

  I was in terror now of what else I would hear.

  There was an infamous trapdoor in Gebi interrogation center, Masihi told me. It was known by repute to all the EPLF. Opened, the trapdoor gave onto a narrow stone stairwell which descended into a cellar where first the Italian cavalrymen and then, during World War II, the British officers’ mess had stored their vintages. They trussed her, her legs bent up her back, her arms behind her, wrists to ankles. They stood on her neck to do it. Trampling on her they dislocated her shoulder so that she had gone into a faint, said Masihi; and without her knowing it, they hurled her roped up down the stairwell. She was there for three days, every bone broken, drifting in and out of awareness.

  “And her father bought her out?” I asked him, grasping at a detail she’d given me.

  “No,” he said. “They released her to a hospital in a coma. They were sure she was dead. They told the surgeon she’d stepped on a mine.”

  He called on me to envisage Amna in splints and traction, suppurating holes in the soles of her feet plugged with gauze soaked in antibiotic and applied by a doctor who had been a Rotarian friend of her father’s. I could see all at once too keenly the desecrated girl, her joints bloated, every bone plastered or splinted, displaying the twenty angry gashes where her nails had been. And those extraordinary lengths of gauze growing from the stigmata in her feet! Had anyone ever been punished as she was punished?

  Agents of the EPLF visited her in the hospital, said Masihi, boys and girls she had known. They arranged for her name to be attached to the body of a peasant girl who was brought there after an authentic mine blast outside Asmara.

  That was how, in something like the way she’d told me, after four months of recuperation, she escaped with her parents and her six siblings through the cordons of Ethiopian security which ringed the outer suburbs of the city, to a village controlled by the Eritreans.

  “They knew,” said Masihi, “that very night. The refinements of Asmara were finished with.

  “You should be told about this,” said Masihi, when he’d finished his account. He said nothing more. His breathing grew steadier, perhaps like someone sleeping, or at least like someone delivered of a burden.

  I remembered now my daydreams of a vigorous, sensual meal of sausages and cabbage and beer shared with Amna Nurhussein in Frankfurt. It was not simply outside the reasonable odds. It was beyond Amna’s capacity to digest. Afan had crucified her, and my distance from such a height of anguish disqualified me.

  We could not share the same table. That—simply—was it.

  The truth so dispirited me that I fell instantly asleep like someone concussed and did not wake until after midnight. There was much running around and considerable noise. Johanes and his raiders were pointing to a column of flame miles to the southeast.

  Editor’s Last Word About Darcy

  Darcy’s account of his Eritrean journey ends here. We know that early in the morning, a little after nine o’clock, a food convoy led by three tanks and two truckloads of infantry appeared on that stretch of road, traveling northeast over a ridge toward the city of Tessenai. The aid trucks themselves carried the flag of the UN.

  From the nest of boulders where they had spent the night, Masihi and his daughter were already running tape of the convoy’s approach. Echoing Fida from the night before, Masihi would later recount how astonished he was at the ease with which things were accomplished here. The first tank was jolted and untracked by a mine Johanes and his soldiers had planted in the road before dawn. The machine settled on the road crookedly, its barrel pointed downward. Another swung off the road, its turret seeking the rebels, but then stalled and was overrun. The third loosed one round from its cannon before it too was swarmed upon by guerrillas. Masihi, being a veteran, said of this one round, which landed high on the ridge, that it gave him an average jolt.

  “And your daughter?” he was asked.

  “Oh, my daughter ignored it,” he said. “She is a natural.”

  “A natural guerrilla?”

  “Exactly. She is. She has found her place in the world.”

  The confused Ethiopian infantry were quickly taken prisoner. All this, said Masihi, would be a sign of battles to come: the then future and now past battle of Agordat, for example, where eighteen thousand Ethiopians would be captured in one of the most massive battles since the Second World War, one which went totally unrecorded in most of the world�
��s press.

  On the day of the convoy ambush, and simultaneously with the capture of tanks and the surrender of infantry, rebels flanking the road received the surrender of the conscript drivers of the aid convoy. Then, confidently, they fired grenades into five trucks along the lines. At this stage it was believed that the scope of the explosions would prove the trucks to be full of armaments.

  As the witnesses—Masihi, Christine, Darcy, and Amna—now emerged from cover to have the Eritrean proposition proved to them, they became aware of Johanes running down the length of the string of trucks yelling in Tigrinyan and English, “Stop! It was a ruse. The trucks are all aid.”

  Masihi says that Darcy wondered aloud if Henry had been able to achieve this much.

  The Eritrean position has ever since been that the Dergue somehow knew of Tessfaha’s plan to capture a disguised arms convoy—that they committed the aid trucks and their inadequate military escorts deliberately to capture or destruction by the rebels.

  Masihi does not pretend that everyone came to instant and simultaneous knowledge of the fact. But there was suddenly a conviction around that the undamaged trucks should now be saved. This was an urgency which seems to have touched Amna. For she was the one who would have to explain this destruction not only in Africa but also to the women of Europe. She is reported to have broken from the cover of the rocks and run to the cabin of the leading truck. Its cargo was burning slowly and there was smoke emerging from its engine. But it was still capable of being driven.

  On the side of its door was the legend With Love from Worldbeat.

  Masihi and Christine would later tell Stella Harries that they saw Darcy, running, join her in the cabin. The burning truck circled the stalled Russian tank and headed across rough country before rolling into a depression. When Masihi could no longer see it, he heard it blow up. It burned blackly.