To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Read online

  The boy laughed at this extreme cinematic style of Masihi’s. The girl, Christine Malmédy, even in that solid heat raised her right hand over her eyes to cover her delight, which was deadpan in her normal style and yet fierce. With her other hand she caressed her right shoulder. Pulling forward until she was stooped. Making the story her own. A tale of her lost father.

  I had once, in Khartoum, met Masihi—or Roland Malmédy, as he’d still been when Christine had last seen him. I knew that deadpan wasn’t his style. I felt a pulse of anxiety for her. If we found him, what would he make of her? Would he look at her noncommittal face and wrongly think she was stupid?

  I’d met her first a week before in the Hotel Akropole in Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan. It was a Thursday evening, a few days before I was supposed to leave the capital for Port Sudan and cross the border into rebel Eritrea. I was dining with two Norwegian acquaintances, both of them army officers and friends of my own friend Stella. Half the Norwegian army seemed to be involved in the aid business in Africa.

  The Akropole is renowned among European travelers in the Sudan. It is an old-fashioned place, the doors of whose rooms, which are generally booked out, open directly onto the lounges and the dining room. In the dining room, a sweet-fleshed variety of Nile perch is served superbly every evening.

  The Akropole is, of course, owned by a Greek family—the Nile, from the Delta in Egypt up through all its cataracts and courses to Lake Tana and Lake Victoria, has always been a Greek highway. It is exciting to think of those relentless Greek traders climbing the cataracts, coming to this elephant-trunk-shaped meeting place of the White and Blue Nile, doing deals with the nomads of the Gezira before there was even a city here or a rumor either of Christ or of the Prophet.

  The Sudan had, until a few years before the night I went to dinner there, a Marxist president, Numeiri, and during his time all the aid agencies had been expelled from the country. The Greek family which runs the Akropole had, however, kept all aid running, arranging for the clearance of customs documents, for the delivery of goods which arrived at sandy Khartoum airport or by way of the great harbor of Port Sudan. My friend Stella swore by this family of experienced African operators, these two youngish Greek men and their wives, and an elegant mother in her sixties.

  And in the evening, the Akropole’s turbanned Sudanese waiters moved around the dining room with the calm style of men who have canny and spirited employers. I loved to sit and watch them do their stuff, bringing soup and fish to the tables full of journalists, aid and medical workers, engineers, and businessmen of the city.

  On Thursday evenings, after the cry to prayer from the El Kabir Mosque brought on the clear Nilotic night, dinner was followed by a late-release movie shown on a video machine on the roof.

  We’d finished the meal and were talking over coffee when we noticed a young European girl waiting some five steps from the table for a chance to interrupt and introduce herself.

  I thought there was something infallibly French about her. Young Canadian, American, British, and Australian aid volunteers were plentiful in the region, but I knew this girl was not one of them. She had that slightly underfed European look, though she was not abnormally short. Her face was an untidy, European one, full of planes. It lacked blandness. I could imagine it in time coming to express a middle-aged existential despair.

  She’d made herself up in a careless but vivid sort of way to come to the Akropole. Her hair was brunette and was heavily and sensibly cropped for travel in this dusty republic. She wore a halter-neck sleeveless top which would have earned her corporal punishment under President Numeiri and could even land her in trouble under the present law of the Sudan. This unwisely chosen garment suggested that she was a recent arrival in the country.

  I went through a sort of dumbshow, raising my eyebrows to let her know it was all right to intrude if she wanted to. She saw the signal, stepped forward, and began speaking in accented English. “Mr. Dar-cy! You are a friend of my father’s, I think. I am Christine Malmédy.”

  The army officers and I ran through the list of our African acquaintances, which in my case wasn’t very extensive. Before we’d finished she said, “They nickname him Masihi. You may know that name. But his true name is Roland Malmédy. Do you know him now?”

  “Masihi?” I asked. “The cameraman?”

  She nodded.

  In fact I knew him, the filmmaker called Masihi. But one of the Norwegian officers had even been into Eritrea, and announced now to the girl that he’d seen Masihi working “in the field,” as the Eritreans referred to their besieged nation.

  As if we wanted to flatter her, we began telling her all at once about her father. How he was a legend in the region, a sort of cinematic Lawrence of Arabia who came over the mountains into Sudan every few years with appalling footage of the war, footage of napalm raids by the Ethiopian air force from which the sizzled flesh had not been cut out. Polemic film, as Masihi liked to call that stuff. He would show it to the journalists and the aid workers in Khartoum. I had seen his footage during my first visit to Sudan.

  “I saw him a year ago,” I told the girl. “My friend Stella Harries knows him much better than I do and introduced me to him right here, in a villa in Khartoum.”

  The girl looked away and laughed softly and to herself. “Does he wear a turban?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “He certainly wears a turban. Speaking of that—of clothes, I mean—I hope you’ll forgive me for saying that the sort of blouse you’re wearing doesn’t go down well with the local authorities.”

  She shook her head. “It was the only thing I had time to pack,” she said, as if she expected that an answer like that should satisfy the Sudanese police. Saying it, she had the pinpoint eyes and the air of a woman who had packed in a hurry and didn’t want to be delayed by local nit-picking.

  One of the Norwegians laughed. “You are as brave, mademoiselle, as your father.”

  “And perhaps as foolhardy,” said the other correctively.

  But then their eyes shifted away from her in embarrassment. Because she was still palpably a child belonging to someone, and we weren’t sure whether it could plausibly be a man with such an odd history as Masihi. She was a bit of a rare case—she’d lost her father to a revolution, rather than to some woman who was a stranger to her and her mother.

  “The Eritreans are my stepmother,” she said suddenly, reading our tentativeness. We blinked at that. She was as aware of the ironies of her situation as we were, and that routed and bemused us. “I am on my way to see him if I can,” she announced. “The manager is telling me that you too are going to Eritrea, Mr. Darcy.”

  “To Eritrea, to Eritrea,” muttered one of the army officers in a sing-song Scandinavian voice. He was wistful at the memory of the heroic Eritreans, even though his journey there had been harsh and marred by illness.

  She did not take her eyes off me. “You are a journalist, the Greek family say.”

  I still wasn’t used to that description. But I said I was. I said I was writing for The Times. Even these days that generally headed off further questions. It was a name which seemed to sedate the inquirer’s itch to ask more.

  “So you will write about the war or the hunger?” she asked.

  “About anything I find,” I said. I did not tell her about the Eritrean Colonel Tessfaha and his more specific invitation to do with an ambush in the direction of Asmara.

  “My father was a journalist. A camera journalist.”

  “He still is,” one of the Norwegians insisted.

  “No,” she said, barely shaking her head. “When I was fifteen he wrote to me and said he wasn’t a journalist any more. That he kept the film diary for the rebels.”

  “Well, that too,” I admitted.

  “My mother,” said Christine Malmédy, “says he was a very strict maker of films. He wanted to win awards. She says that the rough ground and the bad equipment in Eritrea should make him mad. She said anything like that made him mad w
hen he was married to her. Anything that was … at all … not up to the mark. Anything … unprofessional.”

  We said nothing. The unspoken truism lay between the three of us men like an embarrassment: What drove someone mad in a marriage is not necessarily what will drive him mad when he’s left it.

  But I knew her father must have always been an imperfect and occasional parent. He had been, he’d told me, a cameraman for the French government network in Beirut, where he acquired his Arabic nickname. So that even before he left Lebanon for Eritrea, he already must have been no more than a visitor in her life.

  I found I remembered pretty sharply the sun-tanned, tired-eyed Roland Malmédy, and how, during a night we sat up illicitly drinking, he’d explained that the Palestinians had disappointed him as a man seeking the revolutionary essence. He used a phrase, “La Révolution, la femme particulière!” The Palestinians didn’t have it, they were faction-ridden. Some of their factions blew up planes and threw grenades into airline queues peopled by blank-faced innocents. Besides that, there were always Syrian and Israeli intrusions to muddy the image Masihi saw through his viewfinder in Beirut.

  The Eritreans, he said, were different.

  In 1975, at a time this halter-necked girl who now sat at table with the two Norwegians and me was perhaps not yet seven, Malmédy-alias-Masihi heard news of the pure and highly focused revolution in Eritrea. Financed by his television network, he had flown south to Baladiyat Adan—which the British had once called Aden—in South Yemen. He had caught a Red Sea ferry which did a circular route to pick up the poorest of hadjis, or pilgrims, returning from Mecca.

  He’d landed at last in the Ethiopian-held port of Massawa on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea. Led by a young Eritrean rebel who carried the sound gear, he marched ten days, toting his own 16-millimeter camera, to reach the Eritrean rebel positions just north of the great highland capital of Asmara. There he had found the people of his heart.

  In Fryer River, at the center of another continent, I had sacrificed my wife for a people I could not belong to. If Bernadette came looking for me now, what new disappointments would I have ready for her? I felt—it’s almost embarrassing to say it—a fatherly pulse of fear for this scrawny, serious French girl. Was there room for this child under the peculiar umbrella of Masihi’s femme particulière?

  I think it was Masihi’s company that night we all met him in Khartoum which ultimately persuaded Stella that she had to go to Eritrea. I believe she was very taken with Masihi. But briefly, since Masihi was always moving.

  I knew, too, that Roland Malmédy had filmed three famines in the lowlands and highlands of Eritrea, had recorded the great Eritrean advances of 1977, when the Ethiopians seemed for all purposes defeated and finally expelled. Arriving in the hills outside the port of Massawa with the Eritrean vanguard in the predawn of a September morning of 1977, he had filmed the bombardment which the Soviet navy out in the Red Sea was laying down on the Eritrean positions. This was all famous footage among journalists and aid workers.

  The Russians, of course, had a historic desire for ports like Massawa—ice free, tranquil, screened by islands. Here they poured into the fight, in support of their Ethiopian allies, all the tanks and MIGs and Antonovs they could supply; called in also the East German security forces, the tank drivers and artillerymen of the South Yemeni Republic; called or invited in ten thousand Cubans, avid for African experience. And in the face of such force, Masihi had filmed the Eritrean retreat to a long high trench line north of the city of Asmara, and then the rebel repulse of the eight offensives the Ethiopians threw at them.

  He had recorded also the educational passion of the Eritreans, the skills I hoped to see exercised in caves and bunkers and brush shelters. He had filmed their surgery performed in holes in mountains, their fervent dances, all their celebrations.

  His daughter’s present urgency had made her a very unrealistic traveler. When I asked her was she staying there, at the hotel, she told me that the Greeks had no room.

  Then she said without any concern, “I have my sleeping bag. I can stay in that park by the Blue Nile.”

  My friends the Norwegian officers both raised their eyes in a way which imagined the worst. Dangerous little Nile urchins and disgruntled Sudanese soldiers moved at night through that park beside the river.

  I told her that she could stay at Stella Harries’ place. This was the top half of a villa in North Khartoum. Downstairs was rented by a surgeon, upstairs by Stella. The garden was always full, during the morning, of women wearing masks, sitting patiently on stone benches and waiting for gynecological advice.

  Since Stella was in England visiting her parents, two rooms were free in her half villa, Stella’s own bedroom and the small one out the back which everyone called “the pit.”

  Stella has stories of people, aid workers and journalists, coming back from the battle fronts and the refugee camps of Sudan and sleeping off their fevers and mystery viruses there. I decided Stella would probably want the girl to use her bedroom.

  “You must accept Darcy’s offer,” one of the Norwegian officers told the girl. “The park is far too dangerous.”

  “Very well,” said the girl, glancing away. I could see it didn’t worry her one way or the other. She just wanted to be on her way. I was both amused and a little chagrined that she showed no gratitude. But then she surprised me by staring into my eyes. “Too kind,” she said with emphasis. It sounded like a phrase she had picked up from reading English novels.

  A little later, we all took our dinner chairs up to the roof and watched a Paul Newman film set in the snows of Philadelphia. Above our heads the dry, enormous sky produced a full moon so bright that it was hard to appreciate the artful umbers of the camerawork. The girl sat with us, watching without complaint but without apparent interest. As the credits began to roll and the hotel guests began to talk and light cigarettes, she said, “It’s curious—don’t you think, Mr. Darcy?—to see Paul Newman in the open.”

  “It’s the way a lot of Africans see him,” I said, covering a grin. I was disarmed by her metropolitan French innocence, the fact that lots of Frenchmen throughout France’s wide African empire would have watched movies in roofless cinemas. I was, of course, working round to the vanity of telling her that that was how I had seen my childhood films, too, as an infant of another empire. In cinemas wide open in summer, a roof of canvas flung over in winter.

  So I began to tell her, in an old bore sort of way I couldn’t stop myself falling into, about the remoter towns in Australia where my father had managed banks. Years past, as a student, I’d liked to talk about these distant wheat and wool towns, about cinemas open to the sky, about wide-verandahed pubs and stolid Victorian banks dressed up in yellow or blue paint, about whole towns dazzled to inertia by recurrent, glaring noons.

  Memories of my student orations make me cringe a little now. Those Australian villages, I would say, were dominated by drought, the memory of it and the prospect of its rolling around again. That much was true. And then I would start badmouthing the graziers and wheat-growers for thinking they could be farmers on the European model. I wrote a poem once in which I said, “They did not get the sun’s long message.” I liked to say that what the sun brought to these little bush shires was news of that other great and absolute continent it had left half a day past and would soon return to—Africa, that is. I admitted the farmers loved the earth. I’d seen too many of them weeping in the bank, or turning up with tormented faces at our front door asking for audiences with my father. They would certainly suffer to hold to their ground through all the fairly unyielding demands of the big banks, demands my father could only soften to a certain degree and not in essence. But, again, they didn’t get the sun’s long message.

  Which was, of course, that Australia and Africa were sisters. “Two gangling and dark sisters from the one black dam of Pangaea.” (Me, in one of the speeches!) This was long before the time my wife, Bernadette, and I received our fierce enlightenment i
n Fryer River, in Australia’s Western Desert. Before, that is, I’d woken up to the fact the world wouldn’t go to much trouble to fit itself into my smart-aleck theories. So I was capable of standing, pale but cocksure, for shameful lengths of time at the bar of squalid Melbourne student pubs and talking about this dark relationship.

  I’d heard from some science undergraduate, for example, that the botany of the two continents was related, always allowing for the fact that the Indonesian deep-sea trenches protected Australia’s eccentric plants for millennia from outside influence.

  So, armed with half-truths, I’d say, “Just look at the plants of the two places!”

  I knew I was on safe ground. Very few of the student boozers had looked at the plants.

  I wasn’t seriously interested in whether Australia and Africa were sisters, half-sisters, cousins. I was just a colonial boy trying to explain that Europe wasn’t the only model, might in fact be a misleading model. “A pale though fertile mother stricken with low blood count and sated with all the frantic passions of culture.” (Me again, in a speech.) It was a common enough Australian argument, say twenty years ago: “We’re not just a poor relation, you know. We’ve got rich and unexpected kinships!”