To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Read online

  I hasten to say that the drinking student Darcy had no real boyhood obsession with Africa as such. That wasn’t what brought me to the Sudan and to the roof of the Akropole, this night twenty years after all my student fervors had been well and truly quenched by the absolutely grotesque business of my marriage.

  When I finished talking to the girl about open-air cinemas in the Australian bush, the Norwegians started in on fantastical stories of their own sub-Arctic childhoods, tales of astounding lengths of darkness and of daylight, and what that did to folk. The girl listened politely—I watched her and was touched because I realized she must have listened to me exactly the same way. For behind the politeness, I could see, these tales of climatic quirks didn’t capture her or have application. Again, she just wanted to get going to Port Sudan and then into the mountains across the Eritrean border, where Masihi could be found.

  At last it was time to go. I said good-night. The Norwegians gave me plenty of advice on Eritrean diarrhea and promised I’d lose some of my London flabbiness. I led the French girl downstairs at last, out under the wide arcade at ground level, where a dozen child beggars slept at night.

  Khartoum is full of child refugees, sucked into the city by need. Some of them lost their parents to thirst or hunger on treks up along the railway line from the south. They are tough, spare, fierce children. The gentle ones are dust across the railway line in Kordofan province.

  Their demeanor toward someone dressed as I was, in the paramilitary gear of the aid worker or the journalist, is usually pretty passive. They understand that people such as we are uninformed by any Islamic tradition of alms. For us the gift of fifty piastres, even a Sudanese pound, to a given child isn’t the answer to the question. The child beggars seem to know that we world-beaters from the outside think we’re engaged in larger and more mysterious alms: the doing-away with beggary through as clever a scheme as we can devise, not through the rewarding of it as a trade.

  But a large-eyed thin girl like Christine, wearing a halter-neck as well, was worth putting out your hand to. Someone uninformed enough to dress like that was probably also uninformed enough to give them gifts. And certainly, as I automatically called “Imshi!” to the kids, she stopped and began to search her pockets for coins. She did not drop them into their palms—she didn’t try to avoid their flesh. The flinch of the hand and face which characterizes most almsgivers, whether in Manhattan or Cairo, wasn’t seen in her. Surrounded by them, she almost looked one of them.

  I’d been using Stella Harries’ four-wheel-drive truck, and while we were driving back toward Stella’s half villa in North Khartoum, I found that the girl hadn’t any Sudanese papers at all, except for the visa which had got her into the country. Nor did she have any invitation from the Eritreans to go through into their embattled region. Just to get as far as Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where an Eritrean truck could fetch her, she would need an ornate movement permit from the Sudanese.

  I tried to swallow the irritation I felt. I knew that all the next day would be spent in the offices of Sudanese immigration, in police offices as well, waiting on benches with an Islamic patience which isn’t really my character, while officials took their mysterious time, not wishing to offend God by working faster than they knew He did.

  “Did you come on an impulse?” I asked her.

  “No. But I wanted to come here as quick as I could.”

  I wanted to ask her whether her mother knew she was here. But though she looked like a child, she had a woman’s presence, and it was her business. I asked her if she had any passport pictures, and she searched languidly inside the large leather bag she carried and dropped perhaps a dozen tiny straight-faced photographs on the seat beside me.

  “That’s good,” I said. “You need photographs for everything. You’ll need half a dozen documents. Even a permit to take scenic photographs.”

  “But I don’t have a camera,” she told me.

  “Wouldn’t your family want you to bring home a photograph of Masihi?”

  She waved this possibility aside. “The rebels have a camera section. They can give me a photograph.”

  But she sounded as if she half expected to stay in Eritrea for good.

  The route to Stella Harries’ place goes up Zubeir Phasher Street, a typically broad Khartoum thoroughfare. That night its pavements were silted up with sand from a habub of a few days past. But there was also a detritus of garbage and rubble which might easily prove to be, on closer inspection, some huddled child shipped up from the south as a house slave by a pederastic Sudanese officer and now used up and thrown onto the streets. For that was another way the poor of the provinces made it to the big city.

  “You speak English so well,” I remarked to the girl, making conversation in this sad city.

  “My mother managed a French hotel in London.”

  “After Masihi …?”

  “Yes. I went to school there for six years.” I was going to make some conventional noise about her disrupted childhood, but she nodded toward the road ahead. “Look, there’s a policeman.”

  We were nearing the great circle of road which runs around the outskirts of the market named Suq Two, always still brightly lit late at night, a great swath of canvas under which peaches, oranges, and dates are displayed. At the stem of the Suq Two roundabout a Sudanese policeman walked into the street armed with an ancient British rifle and waved at me to stop. I obeyed.

  The policeman leaned in at the cabin window. I cursed the infidel halter-neck the girl was wearing.

  “Salaam!” I told the man, and since he seemed to be a Nuba and the Nuba often spoke English, asked, “Is there any problem, sir?”

  I knew even as an occasional visitor that the man wanted to test me, to work out in what degree I harbored the most treasured Sudanese virtues—politeness, composure, that patience which is in fact a kind of humility in the face of time’s great circle. I handed over my papers, the ones which had smiling from them a slightly plumper, slightly younger, not quite as bald Darcy. A photograph in fact taken before the tribal disaster hit Bernadette and me.

  The Nuba handed back my papers and inspected the girl, asking only for her passport. He stared with particular emphasis at her shoulders, as if he was punishing her with desire.

  “Do you have any Scotch with you?” he asked.

  I told him I didn’t drink. That wasn’t exactly true—I drank with Stella when she was at home. But she knew the ropes and had a reliable supplier. She spoke Arabic well, too. For anyone who didn’t, the dangers of being found with a black-market bottle were considerable enough to make you hesitate—jailing and flogging and public humiliation. Besides, the stuff cost two hundred Sudanese pounds a bottle, and as a freelance I wasn’t well enough off to dispose lightly of that amount of money.

  “Do you want some khat?” the Nuba policeman then asked me.

  The girl was ignorant of the subtlety of this question, I was pleased to note. For it implied I was taking her home for sex, and the axiom even among the aid workers was that sex was mightily enhanced by khat. I knew, too, that my buying the khat would be the policeman’s price for overlooking Christine Malmédy’s bare arms. I had been very happy until now behaving paternally toward the girl. Now the Nuba had offended me with the other possibility. I had no desire, and the question was why, and the answer was only partially Christine’s childlike scrawniness.

  Stella had told me the going price for a wad of khat was about twenty-five Sudanese pounds. I took out a collection of five-pound notes. The Nuba languidly placed a heavy wad of the drug on my lap.

  “The lady should know that Sharia’h is the strict law in the Sudan,” he said. “The law of Islam is the law of the land.”

  This was—and I could have said this if I had been bold or stupid enough—the exact cause of conflict between the Islamic north and the Christian south, a conflict I’d written about last time I was here. But not this time. I suspected the Eritrean war, far to the southeast in the Ethiopian highlands, wou
ld occupy me wholly.

  I said the politest good-night to the Nuba.

  “I will burn this damned shirt,” murmured Christine.

  “No, you can store it as Stella Harries’.”

  “I bought it for the film festival last year. It didn’t cause any trouble at all in Cannes.”

  In the market the next morning, before we went to the police and Interior offices, I helped Christine buy three khaki shirts, for the Eritreans suggested that color—it did not show up against the ochres of the Eritrean landscape and did not attract the eyes of bomber pilots.

  Christine handled the shirts with the bewildered reverence of a recruit receiving her uniform. A brown shirt buttoned to the neck, with the sleeves buttoned at the wrist or even rolled up one or two turns, did not offend against the Sharia’h. Nor attract the attention of big Nubian cops with khat for sale.

  Since she hardly had any more money than she needed to fly to Port Sudan, I bought her a water bottle, too—she hadn’t thought to bring that particular item with her.

  I enjoyed steering Christine around the town; I was restored to a flush of paternity as we consulted each other over the question of her shirts.

  “They don’t even like short sleeves?” she asked me, astonished in her mute way.

  “Not even short sleeves. Only people in temperate zones find it’s decent to flirt with the sun. Here, a bare arm is like a buttock.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she murmured, but a truck went by and in a second she was brushing dust off the front of her new khaki as if the hedonism of film festivals on the Cote d’Azur were well lost.

  The Eritreans also kept an office in Khartoum. Driving to it, I asked her if she wanted to visit Omdurman later in the day? It was, after all, the city’s chief tourist attraction, the site of the tomb of the Mahdi, the great Sudanese unifier whose Dervishes had captured Khartoum and killed General Gordon a century before. There had then been a great battle over there in Omdurman, where General Kitchener had mown down the Mahdi’s troops.

  As I spoke of Mahdi the Avenger and of the Battle of Omdurman, she looked at me as if I were naming rock groups too esoteric for a normal, busy girl to take an interest in. To hell with Omdurman! She had come to Africa to see one sight—Masihi the filmmaker.

  An old-fashioned and no doubt racist print of brave General Gordon at the head of a staircase in Khartoum and facing the first of a tide of Dervishes advancing up the stairs with a spear had hung on the walls of one of the number of bush schools I’d gone to in Australia. The memory of it caused me to ask about Christine’s education.

  When I asked, she let me know that she’d been studying graphic arts at some polytechnic near Fontainebleau.

  “Do you like it?”

  “I would prefer to study film, but that makes my mother nervous. She says filmmakers have no proper life.” The girl shrugged and smiled briefly. “With graphic arts you can make a living and still pretend you’re doing proper, serious work.”

  “You might be able to help your father,” I remarked. But I wasn’t sure whether it was right to start such hopes in her.

  In any case, she didn’t seem to have any unrealistic yearnings. “I can do sound,” she said. “I’ve done sound for some of the students in the film course.”

  Tessfaha

  When I first came to London, I was equipped to take Fleet Street or Wapping by storm. I gravitated toward the aid newspapers in Covent Garden. I attended press briefings by prominent African exiles or by African foreign ministers visiting the old imperial capital. After the vast electricity of the Australian sky, England’s low horizon suited me as well as the unchallenging work. I lived poorly in one-room-with-kitchenette in southwest London. Bernadette did not call me. I used half my earnings telephoning Australia, talking to those who now knew where and how she was.

  Having been at one time very nearly, though unofficially, the Times correspondent on matters of remote Australia, I was invited by an adventurous editor to travel to the Sudan, a republic tormented by tribalism, and to write about the civil war in the south. For a time there I traveled with a water drilling crew under the protection of a Sudanese army escort. I sent my stories back from the Akropole in Khartoum. That sprawling, annoying, and engrossing capital delayed me for some time. In the Sudan Club I met Stella Harries, the BBC correspondent in Khartoum.

  Given that the cost of living in Khartoum was so much cheaper than England, I stayed on for some months, operating on the basis of a loose brief from The Times, selling some taped material to Australian and Canadian radio, living in Stella Harries’ villa. She soothed my pride by accepting a token rent. Despite Stella’s urging, I resisted learning Arabic. Stella accused me of behaving as if learning Pitjantjara had been dangerous enough. The loss of Bernadette had made me suspicious of languages.

  I lacked the confidence, too, to set myself up in my own right in the Sudan. At last I headed back to the misty and squalid comforts of England. I took the cheap flights through Saudi Arabia, not the more fashionable British Airways or Austrian Airlines, the ones on which high Sudanese officials flew.

  When, at Stella’s urging, I contacted the Eritrean office in London, to put myself on their mailing list for press releases, I was flattered to find that they knew about me, had read my work in The Times. They sometimes invited me to go with them to an Eritrean restaurant in London.

  On a grim February day earlier this year, after my visit to Colorado, they called me and invited me to meet one of the visiting leaders from “the field,” a man named Tessfaha. They did not comment on Tessfaha’s exact status and function in the Eritrean struggle. They referred to him as “the Colonel,” but I didn’t know whether that was a rank or a nickname. The meeting place was an Eritrean restaurant in Kilburn.

  I’d half expected the other Eritreans would be included in the dinner party. So my eyes flickered around the restaurant looking for a group but picked up only one shape, very tall and thin, leaning by one of the tables in the darker reaches of the place.

  “Is this an O.K. table?” asked Tessfaha, indolently intent, absolutely at home in a world where people chose not only what food to eat but also the spot of all spots to eat it in. “My colleagues tell me they always bring you here, but they suspect you might prefer Indian food.”

  “No,” I insisted. “This food is good for me.”

  “You might well prefer French cuisine, though it’s generally too much for our people, even if they live in the West for years. If you grow up on millet and lentils, the stomach simply cannot believe in French cuisine. It’s a sort of gastronomical nirvana which leaves the stomach gasping. I suppose I am used to it because of the EEC politicians who speak to me over dinner in Strasbourg. Anyhow, please say if you would prefer another restaurant …”

  Again I denied it, so at long last we sat. Waiting for our food, we both drank beer. I remarked I’d thought that perhaps some of the others from the Eritrean office might have been with him. Normally they would have been, said Tessfaha. But they were busy; they had a lot of what was called in the West “fence-mending” to do in view of our friend the rock singer’s broadcast.

  “The tyrant,” Tessfaha told me, “moves people by the million from ancestral ground to concentration camps of his choosing, where they starve in sight of well-fed officials. Yet it is not the tyrant who bears the blame, but somehow it is we the Eritreans. Because we attacked thirty trucks and brought the rock singer close to tears on television! In fact the number of trucks was not thirty but twenty-three … but even so. What brutes would deliberately anger such a nice young rocker, make him shed tears for the nature of man? What brutes would throw grenades at aid trucks? My colleagues have to answer questions of that nature, and they find it dispiriting.”

  I confessed I thought people were entitled to ask that sort of question.

  “Especially,” agreed Tessfaha languidly, “since some of the trucks we load our own supplies on from Port Sudan actually carry the generous rock singer’s slogan: Wi
th Love from Worldbeat. Especially since also we are grateful to him for the impartiality with which he gave help to us as well as to the Ethiopians. And so, the world asks, What manner of ingrates are these Eritrean bandits?”

  Tessfaha smiled subtly behind a double moustache of hair and beer froth.

  “I suspect that you aren’t ingrates,” I conceded. “So perhaps there has to be a reason which evades the understanding of both the singer and myself.”

  Tessfaha took from the pocket of his sports jacket a brown paper envelope marked Do Not Bend. From it he slid out a color photograph. It was like some which Stella Harries herself had taken during her journey to Eritrea. In it three Eritrean rebels sat on stones. Two girls and a boy, none of them much more than, say, twenty years of age. One of the girls looked ironically, frankly at the camera. She wore khaki shirt and shorts. Her long legs were knees-up to the lens. And on her feet were the standard plastic sandals. Beside her sat a tall young boy, not as skeletal as Tessfaha. He, too, was barelegged, but his ankles were encased in old-fashioned military gaiters. The third rebel did not look at the camera at all. She was writing something in an exercise book. Her hair, like that of the other two, was exactly barbered. She wore long khaki pants bleached to paleness, and a crisp white shirt under her khaki jacket. A thorn bush cast a shadow over her.

  The photograph thus expressed from left to right a gradation—from frank girlish interest in the lens through an equal degree of boyish curiosity in the middle to quiet young scholarship on the right.

  A caption, typed on flimsy paper, was glued to the photograph. It said, “Three young EPLF rebels, fifty meters from the Nacfa frontline trenches.”

  Tessfaha pointed indolently to the figures in this photograph. “Those are the ones who so distressed the rock singer. And if not them, children like them, children younger than the war itself. Remember the Vietnam war? I was at Georgetown University when Saigon fell. The relief and the shame of that! Students held placards which said, No More Babies Need Burn! But these three I show you were babies then, and still in their way they burn. Do these two girls and this boy assault aid trucks, believing perhaps that it is better for the people to perish than to be fed by the enemy?”