To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Read online

  A woman came to take our orders. Without answering the questions he’d posed, Tessfaha ordered heartily—salad, spinach lasagna, a new beer apiece. As if he had not just now been talking about food and the burning of food, he gave due weight to choosing from the menu, discussing ingredients with the English waitress.

  At last, the order settled, he returned to me and to his argument. I was to remember, he said, what these children younger than the war had seen. In the towns and the pastoral villages where they had grown up, they had often watched convoys of aid pass, never stopping, ignoring a famished landscape, moving toward the great granaries of the army, of the oppressor. Walking pot-bellied behind their father’s goats, they had seen the grain of America, Canada, Australia, benign New World grain, bypassing them always, traveling in the same string of trucks as the artillery shells. Food, after all, must not be put into the hands of the troublesome, of the seditious Eritreans and Tigreans. “Unless, of course, the presence of foreign observers and monitors of aid makes a certain sharing necessary.”

  Such were the causes which had made these children rebels, which had, on top of other experiences, raids, confiscations, massacres, caused them to go to the mountains and join the rebels. For in the remotest villages, Tessfaha argued further, the children had observed worse perversions still than the ones he’d just detailed. They had seen Arab caravans moving from the south, across the starving grounds of Eritrea, into the Sudan. Camels loaded with grain and cheese and powdered milk, consigned to the markets of the Sudan by Ethiopian generals and officials on the make.

  “And so now that they have arms in their hands,” Tessfaha murmured, gesturing with the hand which didn’t hold his beer, “the children look from the ravines down onto the roads where the convoys move, and history, all they know of it, does not dispose them to accept the lines of trucks at their face value. For even if the vehicles carry the flag of the Red Cross, even if they say With Love from Worldbeat, these children believe the convoys move under military command, that they are driven by the military or else by conscripted drivers. And now one of our regional commanders, leading our young and maddened by the hypocrisy, has at last made an error of judgment and burned a string of trucks.”

  He paused, and then, as if out of transcontinental solidarity, he turned his eyes and mine to older turpitudes still. “Did Stalin try to feed the Ukrainians? Did he wish to behold in his dreams a countryside of plump Ukrainians? Did he weep when he discovered that he and the generous Westerners had failed between them to keep life in some ten or fifteen million of his enemies? Or did he sleep better for seeing them vanish? Was, indeed, their going his purpose? Ai, the politics of food …”

  The spinach lasagna arrived. My appetite had been blunted by the colonel’s intense picture-making, but Tessfaha began working on the food functionally, quickly. I could see strands of spinach on the man’s tongue as he continued to speak. Now the EPLF had offered to negotiate truces and safe conduct for convoys of bona fide aid, but the Ethiopian Dergue did not want safe conduct, wished to go on mixing the food and the armaments, wished to have the benefit of any Eritrean mistake in attacking those convoys which for once hauled nothing but food. From that occasional error a gracious benefit came to the regime. Namely, that the impeccable young rock star stood amid the desolation and was moved to tears.

  “The rock singer,” said Tessfaha, chewing fiercely, “whom I love like a brother, does not weep for the complexity of the question. The rock singer stands near smoking vehicles and burning grain”—though my memory of the newsclip was that it was among hungry children that the rock singer stood—“and merely says, Oh the blindness of the rebels!”

  “You’re telling me,” I asked, by now a little irked by Tessfaha’s spate of rhetoric, “that the Ethiopians dress up their military convoys as convoys of aid? That they carry the insignia of the Red Cross, say, but are in fact convoys of armaments and supplies?”

  Tessfaha agreed. That was exactly the accusation. I was engrossed by the way that, while he spoke, he still went on deftly and studiously cutting up sectors of spinach and cheese with his fork.

  “This is a hefty sort of accusation,” I told him. “I can’t see why the aid bodies who work with the Ethiopians would let it happen?”

  Tessfaha nodded toward the photograph that still lay by the salad. “It’s not extraordinary news if you come from Africa. Those three know it. Every soldier in their sector knows it. Every Ethiopian soldier in the opposing trench line knows it. Every Ethiopian in every garrison in Eritrea knows it. Every Somali and Oromo knows it. It is not so extraordinary, it is not startling. It is the daily traffic of the hunger zone.”

  He cut up the last of his lasagna.

  “There isn’t much I can do,” I found myself saying. “I could talk to the editor about it, but I lack objective information. I don’t think, with respect, that we could consider you objective information.”

  Tessfaha smiled. “No, I am not objective,” he admitted pedantically. “I confess to being in some ways subjective, or at least to not being able to demonstrate my objectivity.”

  Nonetheless I knew at once Tessfaha had something to suggest. We ate and drank a while longer, though. The something did not emerge.

  And then, when we were down to the lees of our second beer, it presented itself. If I were there at an attack on a convoy! If I could report that! Would The Times perhaps fly me as far as Port Sudan, after which the Eritreans would look after me? As well as they looked after Stella Harries, Tessfaha promised, smiling. In a cashless society, since south of Port Sudan cash did not operate!

  I did my best to seem calm and qualified and dubious, but in fact I felt a great giddiness. I’d had little to drink, but nonetheless I took ecstatically to the idea of a rehabilitative journey. I found at moments of promise like this one that I thought about rehabilitation in terms of impressing my wife. I knew that she was no longer interested in any penance I might do, but I couldn’t convince myself of it.

  As well, there seemed to be all at once a strange acrid smell above the table—the dusty smell you got in the streets of Khartoum in the minutes before the khamsin struck. I realized then that it was the odor of my own fear and excitation. And to be frank, the stench of simple ambition as well. Not just the primitive hope of arresting Bernadette’s attention, but straightforward ambition: to be there, at the point where the crucial things happen, the things which—when adequately witnessed—change the opinion of the world.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” I told him. Knowing I’d already thought of everything.

  Mark Henry

  The Eritreans at their office in the city had warned me that our—Christine’s and my—date of departure for Port Sudan coincided with the third anniversary of Numeiri’s overthrow. Flights out of the city’s mud brick barracks of an airport to Port Sudan might be canceled without explanation. The army might, for purposes of their own, seize the few aircraft of Air Sudan.

  Indeed, Christine and I found the blue wooden doors, beyond which tickets to Port Sudan were to be issued, locked and barred. I already had my ticket and at least therefore a notional seat on the Air Sudan flight, whenever it left. I’d been prepared to have to compete for a ticket for Christine. I’d not expected these bolted doors, though. I might have once vapored on about the kinship of Africa and Australia, but I found I had a pretty European taste for exact timetables.

  The barring of the domestic airport could mean anything, but no one in front of the doors seemed to have been flustered into voicing loud speculations about it. Passengers conversed in polite and discreet Arabic. Public servants and businessmen stood around in their exquisite white jellabas. Family men urged their masked wives into the shade of the terminal’s side wall, since the temperature was far over forty degrees centigrade. Nuba, even Zande tribes-people from the south, carrying tribal slashes on their cheeks and crusader swords in their belts, kept their counsel, their faces shadowed beneath swirls of dazzling white linen. But no one wande
red around asking whether southern rebels had brought down another Boeing with a Stinger ground-to-air, or whether the military had commandeered the domestic aircraft as an early move in a coup. People here knew how dangerous idle opining could be.

  Amid the Muslim women shone the face of an exquisite girl whom I guessed to be Shilluk or Nuer—I’m not informed enough to tell infallibly the difference between tribes—swathed in diaphanous green cloth. A starched headpiece gave an elevation, a nunlike peak, to the fabric across her forehead. The cloth framed a face which was sensual in an ancient way, a face at once innocent and concupiscent. Like most of the men, she carried a highly polished attaché case with tumbler locks. Air Sudan—nicknamed Sudden Death Air by Western journalists—were notorious for being overbooked even when they did fly. In the battle to board the aircraft, the attaché case with its metaled corners might become a weapon.

  Waiting by the wall, too, was a certain blond American I’d seen in the dining room at the Akropole. He lolled against a wall, his head back against the retained night coolness. One of his hips was leaning against a massive duffel bag, and he was riffling through a diary and journal stuffed with photographs, loose pages, grimy business cards. He wore the washed-out browns and duns of an old African cat and had that unfussed look of a frequent flyer on erratic airlines.

  An official opened a judas window in the door and called out some genial information in Arabic. My Arabic is of the phrasebook variety, but I heard the recurrence of the phrase b-it-tayyara, plane. The American seemed to get more of the speech than I did, however. He raised his head, took stock of the crowd, and so caught my eye. It was pretty much that point in a bemusing wait where Europeans in an alien crowd begin to be drawn together anyhow. A primal gathering of skin unto skin.

  The man hitched his enormous duffel bag and strolled toward us.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a midwestern drawl, “if my Arabic serves me right, there are certainly no planes flying. Tickets may be even more speculative.”

  Christine Malmédy groaned and shook her head.

  The American told us the rumor at the Akropole was that the government might relax the Sharia’h, the Islamic law, today, as a gesture toward the southern Sudanese. “In which case,” said the man, “we can all roll round to the old Sudan Club and get tanked, a prospect which doesn’t dismay me in the slightest.” He squinted as if from the first sting of Scotch on the palate.

  Ahead of us, the doors now swung wide. A wedge of people, led by the Nuer-Shilluk woman, surged over the doorstep and into the dimness inside. “I think this is where we do it, ladies and gentlemen,” the American told us. “Inshallah. God willing.”

  In the scrum indoors, he would occasionally stroll up and down chatting in Arabic to one nomad or another, or to a portly businessman. Gradually I began to see that his Arabic wasn’t much better than my own, but he flourished it with greater confidence. The words which emerged most commonly from the American’s discussions with the other Sudanese passengers always included Malesh—too bad!—and Inshallah—if God wills it.

  He took special care of Christine. He knew how to work an African airport scrimmage, how to make openings into which he deftly and unselfishly inserted the French girl. Soon we all had tickets and confirmed seats for a plane which was rumored to be leaving the next day. We did not bother to tell the girl that if there was trouble it was unlikely to leave for two weeks.

  Happily, I’d asked Stella’s Eritrean assistant Ibrahim to wait with the truck. I offered the American a lift into town. He accepted and climbed into the cabin. He reached across the front seat to shake my hand. There were four of us crammed there when he closed the door against his ribs. “My name’s Mark Henry,” he told me. “I’m with Southern Unitarian Aid, but I’m not a southerner and I’m not a Unitarian. I’ve been marking time down in a refugee camp at Wadi Belidayah. Lots of southern Sudanese down there. Great people, sad cases.”

  I introduced Ibrahim, the girl, myself to the American and returned to something he’d said.

  “Marking time?”

  Henry shrugged as well as he could in the room he had. “We were thrown out of Ethiopia. I mean, I was, Southern Unitarian Aid was. Punished for complaining, for stating the obvious. That God doesn’t make famines, governments do. But as you know, Ethiopia is the focus, the glamour post for the aid people. They all want to be there. That’s where they have the really big-time famines. They’ve got lots of prestige invested in staying there. Well, friend, no longer. We’ve been cast out!”

  He shook his head. I’d noticed this sense of exile in other Westerners who’d been expelled from Ethiopia.

  We sweated shoulder to shoulder for a while, talking about the Gezira refugee camps. I didn’t mention that the girl and I were going to Eritrea. Because of my contacts with the Eritrean “colonel” Tessfaha in London, it seemed best to keep that a private matter. But then the American said, “So I got an invitation to travel elsewhere. Eritrea.”

  “Invitation?” I asked.

  “From the Eritreans, the aid people here in Khartoum. I thought I’d go and see the other side of the equation. That’s what they say of Eritrea. It’s the other side of the whole business. You can’t know Ethiopia until you’ve seen Eritrea. Just like you can’t know the U.S. until you’ve seen Mexico.”

  I asked him if he was going to Eritrea right now, as soon as he could get a Port Sudan plane.

  “Exactly right,” said Henry. “And so are you and Miss Malmédy here. The Greeks at the hotel told me.”

  The arrangements I was now stuck with—delayed flights, the girl, the American—had even more thoroughly punctured any of those fantasies about a secret trust which my recent interview with Tessfaha might have raised in me.

  The girl said, with her normal fixity, “I’m going to see my father in Eritrea. He is the filmmaker in that country. His name is Masihi.”

  Henry whistled.

  “He who expects the Messiah,” said Henry. “That’s what it is in Arabic. Does your father expect the Messiah, missie?”

  He laughed without any malice, and the girl shrugged and said, “My mother says he is an atheist and a kind of Marxist. But she thinks all rebels are Marxists. His real name isn’t Masihi. It’s Roland.”

  With the name of Roland hanging over us—the name of that virginal French knight and trumpeter, who burst a cerebral valve while blowing a warning of the coming of the Muslims in the vale of Roncesvalles—we entered upon a small incident, an adventure which—to use a cant term from the social sciences—bonded us as fellow pilgrims. As Ibrahim turned the truck into El Kabir Avenue, we found ourselves facing a broad wave of Sudanese, tightly packed from the walls on one side of the street right across to the sanded-up paving on the other side.

  “Islamic Brotherhood,” said Henry. “Dead on cue.”

  The crowd facing us included devout women as well, apparently chanting and wailing behind their veils. Banners as wide as the avenue carried a legend I’d become familiar with, under the tuition of Stella, during my earlier visit to the Sudan. “Islam is our religion, Allah is our ideology, the Sharia’h is our politics!”

  The marchers, it seemed, were on their way to the Nile banks to dissuade the President from repealing “the law.” They wanted to keep their nation safe from halter-necks and drunkards.

  The truck seemed to back not so much because of Ibrahim’s engaging reverse and expending a little quantity of fuel, but on the gusts of energy from all these fundamentalist folk. In any case we found a quiet laneway, and from there made our way into town by narrower streets. There, at institutions such as the Golden Elephant Panel Beating Company or the Nile Crocodile Electric Repairs Company, less frantic Sudanese had ignored the holiday and got a morning’s work done.

  We seemed to understand that the three of us were fellow travelers now and would not easily escape each other’s company.

  Something About Henry

  The day the girl and I first met Mark Henry in Khartoum,
at the desert fort/airport, Islamic law was not lifted. Nor had the military by dusk taken over the city. In what felt like a normal evening, Henry asked the two of us to dinner at the Sudan Club, a European meeting place which—thanks to the lobbying of the Islamic Brotherhood—was still dry.

  The club stood in what must have been once the best garden in town. It had been laid out, and the bar, mess, and residence built, in the early twentieth century, in the years after Kitchener’s triumph across the river at Omdurman, that bare stretch of hilly ground which Christine Malmédy had shown no interest in visiting.

  Now that the people who built it and the purpose they built it for had both vanished, the club seemed a strange irrelevance. There was a villa on the grounds where British officers and their memsahibs once stayed while in transit. I imagined them resting on the verandahs while their peach-skinned children, now old age pensioners in a new Britain, went hiding and seeking among the date palms.

  In the bar and dining room, officers must have found a continuation of the luxuries of Indian messes. These days, though, the bar where such finicky gentlemen once drank real liquor was full of skin-and-bone aid workers attenuated by malaria, hepatitis, by the so-called “mystery viruses” which rise up out of the Nile, or else by a taste for khat and hashish, which somehow suppress the appetite.

  Having come through the day intact, the Sharia’h was preserved at the bar that night by a turbanned and jacketed barman who had no intention of learning how to pour cocktails. Over a meal of the Sudanese specialty called twisted fish, accompanied by karkedeh juice and soda water, Henry began to talk a little about his history.

  He told us he came from near the Canadian-American border, from the industrial city of Sault Ste. Marie. This coal and steel town sits astride a neck of the Great Lakes, some of its bitter suburbs in Canada, the other half in the United States. As he described it, geographically and in terms of culture, it was its own state. His parents died when he was ten, and he was raised by an uncle for whom he felt some affection. But he disliked the shameful squalor of his home city. He liked what he called “the honest squalor of other parts.”