To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Read online

  “I studied agriculture at a cow college in northern Michigan,” he said.

  “Cow college?” asked Christine.

  “Sorry, missie,” said Henry. “Agriculture.”

  He had an agricultural ranginess, was tall to the point of stooping, with a thatch of hair which had once been golden but had now turned a fairly flaccid nicotine. And he was an old cat in more than African terms—he told us he’d worked for the Peace Corps and for Southern Unitarian Aid in Sumatra, India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and now Sudan. His specialties included soil conservation, deep water holes, small community dams. “I have in my time seen the light enter thousands of faces as the water flowed, friends!”

  He had been put in charge of his organization’s Khartoum office just recently. “But it’s a tough business. Listen, you just can’t get medicine or grain or water drills into the parts that need them most. Into the Southern Sudan, I mean, into Darfur and Kordofan, let alone into the Bahr Al-Ghazal or Equatoria. It’s the civil war. Last month, for example, some rebels handcuffed two of our drivers to the steering wheels of their trucks and then incinerated the trucks! How’s that for a death!”

  The French girl blinked. Then she asked with her usual suddenness, “Are you married?”

  Henry paused in a way which made me suspect inexactly that he had a wife somewhere. “I have a fiancée,” he told us. “She’s a Somali and her name is Petra. She’s under house arrest in Addis. I’m still negotiating her visa.”

  I seemed to remember Stella mentioning a particular American who went around lobbying people, wanting pressure put on the Dergue to give his girlfriend a pardon and an exit visa. I wondered had Stella been talking about this man, Henry? I hoped not, because I believe she said also, “Everyone knows the woman’s probably dead.”

  “I’m bad at languages,” he confessed a little irrelevantly. “I let Petra do most of the talking for me, even though I know a little Amharic. I get by on gestures and bullshit. My only talent, though, is sketching.”

  And he took a few minutes to do us a passable sketch of the waiter.

  Mellowed by the twisted fish, he returned to Petra’s story later in the meal. “I knew her for nine years,” he said, “and I thought I could look forward to knowing her forever. That is, till the big expulsion.”

  I wondered why he hadn’t married her and given her the protection of his passport. But there could have been trouble with her family, who probably didn’t approve of the liaison.

  In any case, in the year he was thrown out, the good rains of July and August had ended a famine in Showa province. It was a point of history at which Henry could congratulate himself that his small wells and dams had saved some hundreds of lives, if not thousands, and might make the future return of cyclical famine less likely in at least a few villages. And then, with little warning, the Ethiopian government, the Dergue, its premier the army officer Haile Mariam Mengistu, successor since 1975 of the Emperor Haile Selassie and displaying the same autocratic habits, expelled SUA from Ethiopia.

  “He chose us to make an example,” Henry forlornly told us in the Sudan Club. “He was gearing up for this eighth great offensive against the Eritreans. He told governments and aid bodies not to give any food or other materials of any kind to the Eritreans. Most of us continued to. And some of the SUA officials, guys more senior than me and more full of opinions, said this and that about his shitty policies. That landed SUA and me on Mengistu’s list of hostile bodies. And the boys at the Ministry of the Interior in Addis didn’t like me having a Somali girl. So I was on the hit roster in any case. Mengistu threw us out with his real enemies, the French crowd Médecins sans Frontières. That’s who he really wanted to get.” He stared into the lees of purple juice in his glass. “But all this goddam expelling didn’t extend to Petra. She stayed! Oh yes, she stayed.”

  The girl leaned forward. “How old is she?”

  Henry waved a hand. He took out a wadded diary, extracted a photograph from it, and waved it in front of us. It showed a woman as tall and thin as the people of Somalia generally are. “Graduate of the University of Addis Ababa,” said Henry. “No cow college for her, a real seat of learning where it was hard for Somalis to get admission.”

  Her father, the American told us, was a surgeon from the Somali city of Mogadishu, and she had worked with the Red Cross in that region called the Ogaden, the great plain in the southeast of Ethiopia which the Somalis consider their own but which was—by decree of the UN—part of Ethiopia. Somalis still persist in calling the Ogaden “Western Somalia,” but—Henry said—Petra avoided even in private such emotional and dangerous terms as that. She was very careful in case anyone mistook her for a Somali rebel. “The Amhara are a great tribe, friends, but you wouldn’t believe how antsy they can be about the others, about the Oromo, the Somalis down in the Ogaden, the Tigreans in the north. Above all, of course, of the Eritreans. If you’re Somali, you don’t have to go around using terms like Western Somalia to get into trouble. On some days they were likely to arrest you just on the basis of your face and your background!”

  I don’t think Henry meant to give us Petra’s full history. He was drawn out by the girl’s dogged questions: “How old is she?” “What is her family?” etc., etc.

  I wondered if my story and Bernadette’s ran as close to the surface of the skin as Henry’s did, whether it could be so easily started running?

  Petra was already working in the Addis office of SUA when Henry first arrived there. “But it was Fetasha that made us friends,” said Henry.

  I’d heard of the period known as the Fetasha, the Search. When the Emperor had first been overthrown by the Dergue, there had been excitement among the robust minorities in the capital: the Somalis, even the small group of Eritreans who were students at the university, and all the others. But Mengistu and the Dergue had by the time of Fetasha disabused them of all hopes. The regime armed gangs of unemployed youths with leftover American weapons from the Emperor’s day and sent them into the streets as vigilantes to keep order, to demand orthodox revolutionary behavior, to take vengeance on those who showed a flicker of fear—fear being misread as false politics.

  Anyhow, Henry used to escort Petra home to her small walled house behind St. George’s Cathedral through the impromptu roadblocks of the Fetasha. He would at one time, he said, stay there for more than a week, keeping guard over her in her tiny rooms.

  I imagined them holding to each other behind shuttered windows, listening to the armed and feckless children scurrying by in sandals, M-16s in their hands. The shouts, the threats of the armed children, and the screams and whimpers of frightened adults were sometimes less than half a block away.

  Whenever he used the word fiancée, the girl and I would find ourselves exchanging glances. She pitied him in her wide-eyed, stark, economical way, and I both pitied and envied him. He was still active in the question, after all; he was still working and angling away for the liberation of the Somali. Over the karkedeh juice and soda in the Sudan Club I was all at once conscious, in a superheated sort of way which cried out to be treated with strong liquor, that I was by contrast outside Bernadette’s affairs, that the time when I could even have pretended to be taking part in them was gone even by the night she ran off in the center of Australia with the jailbird Burraptiti.

  What is obvious—apart from the pity of it—when Henry uses the term fiancée, is that he wants the listener to know that his affair with the Somali woman is a matter of honor and not of mere convenience. During his period of exile from Ethiopia, Henry spent three months with relatives in New York, chivvying U.S. Immigration officials to let Petra into the United States and—more than that—demand that Mengistu issue her with an exit visa. He made the rounds of offices in New York and Washington.

  “I said to them, ‘You fight to get goddam Refuseniks out of Russia. Well, Petra’s a Refusenik.’ When Mengistu sent in that ’85 offensive against the Eritreans—you know, the one they call the Silent Offensive—I frankly hope
d it would work, that the whole thing would be settled and Mengistu would smile and issue exit visas to everyone who wanted to leave. But the Eritreans held and Petra stayed home under house arrest.”

  Henry himself went home to Sault Ste. Marie for Christmas after Mengistu had expelled him. Over the punch, he records, his uncle said to him, “Why didn’t you tell that Mengistu to go fuck himself? He needs you, that monkey!”

  “But the fact is,” Henry told us in the Sudan Club, “I needed my villages. I got these dreams of silt washing off the hillsides, clogging the dam walls, turning them to these shallow ridges. Nightmare stuff. Genuine nightmares! And my uncle—he was just like the rest of the public in the rich world. You couldn’t speak to any of them. They couldn’t understand what drives an aid worker any more than they could understand Himalayan monks. And you can’t explain anything to them; the words in your mouth don’t mean the same as the words in theirs.

  “New Year’s Eve, I drove to this park I knew from my high school days, right above the dirty waterway between Huron and Michigan. I drank a bottle of vodka and ended up in the hospital with hypothermia! See, I wasn’t equipped any more to live in the West.”

  Waiting on the Coast

  The Eritrean-run villa in Port Sudan where Henry and the girl and I waited for our transportation south to Suakin and Eritrea stood in a broad alley by the Red Sea salt pans. It had its own high-walled garden of sand, a little echo of the Sahara. Scattered about this garden were piles of plastic bottles with the label of a West German brand of bottled water. Port Sudan’s water supply was, according to Eritrean analysis, unfit to drink.

  The house was run by wounded veterans of the Eritrean war. One by one they approached us during our first hours there and shook our hands with that solemn thoroughness characteristic of handshakes in the Sudan and Eritrea.

  A young man who edged forward on crutches seemed to have nothing inside the legs of his pants except thin metal substitute limbs. He was nonetheless able to wring our hands. He sat with us at a small table in the hallway.

  “You brought no wood?” he asked, winking at one of his fellow veterans. He was the villa wag.

  Not knowing what was coming, we admitted we’d brought no wood.

  “You should have brought wood. It costs like gold in Port Sudan.” He grinned at us. “I need wood. All the trees are gone from the Red Sea shore.”

  I watched Christine greet this news with an old-fashioned, prim solemnity.

  This young man, it turned out, designed prosthetic arms and legs out of steel and plastic and leather and wood in the yellow garage in the corner of the garden. And the wood was—as he said—expensive.

  Both Henry and the girl seemed to be able to take this strange household as it came. But in a way I’d begun my time in Port Sudan badly. On the afternoon we’d arrived, we’d seen the “therapy cases” returning to the Eritrean clinic from their afternoon walk: emerging from the tracks and small hillocks around the salt pans, those square lakes of Red Sea brine stewing under the last of the sun; from the donkey and camel tracks; from the wastelands around the airport where nomads waited to do business in the city the next day. They came on in long lines, on crutches with crooked determination, in old-fashioned wheelchairs passed down to them from an earlier generation of American or European maimed. Last light from the Red Sea hills lit them. We’d all been awed to see them, but neither Christine nor Henry seemed to have been reduced to the same useless, mawkish fear and reverence which overcame me.

  Both Christine and Henry were able to go off to the garage and watch the young amputee, the one who’d teased us about wood, fitting limbs to legless young men and women. I admired the way Henry and Christine talked there, asking the limb maker prosaic questions about resins and wood and padding. I was meant to be the questioner, the journalist, but I couldn’t achieve a conversational tone. I lost my breath in the middle of sentences. At that stage I thought what a steady, functional companion Henry was going to be.

  Through a gateway across the alley you could enter the much larger blue house which was the Eritrean clinic. It was a fancier institution than the clinic we would later see in Suakin.

  Here, on a stairwell, when I was coming down from the roof, from a visit to a boy who had been cut off at the buttocks by an explosion and who, supported on his strong forearms, had been doing algebra in an exercise book, I saw a thin one-legged girl come to despair. Not yet fitted out with a substitute limb in the yellow garage, not yet familiar with her crutches, she let herself slump sideways in an angle of the stairs. She did not know I was above her, watching. Defeated, she let her shoulders slacken as she considered the blue wall. She wasn’t substantial—she could have been a coat hung there—wishing, I suppose, that the mine or bullet which had taken her limb had also attended to her life. I could tell, as if from the angle of resignation of her dark, braided head seen from above, that she dreaded the rough, cheery rehabilitation her fellow rebels were offering.

  My concern was not to be seen by her, and while I waited there Henry appeared through the same door the girl had. “What’s the trouble, missy?” he asked, brushing by her, reviving her—it seemed to me—with the friction of his joviality. She began to move. I was stuck meanwhile, two flights up, at the far end of the axis of her misery.

  Henry and I hung our rinsed shirts on the wire line in the garden, careful lest they fall on the sand and need a rewash. He looked at home in the withering light, mumbling his way through a series of jazz tunes.

  He’d been just as solid and accepting a man as that when in Khartoum we’d fought our way aboard Air Sudan’s eccentric flight to Port Sudan. The flight engineer had prepared for the takeoff by collecting all the nomads’ crusader swords—they would be in his care until touchdown at Port Sudan. But the second officer wasn’t able to get the forward hatch closed. A mêlée of Sudanese gathered, helping the pilots apply their shoulders, and Henry left his aisle seat and fraternally joined other passengers in trying to force the thing shut.

  They fought with it for three quarters of an hour, and whenever his suggestions, compounded of snatches of Arabic plus some gestures, were discounted by the group, he would wink down the plane at us.

  Throughout, I assured myself fairly impotently that in closing the hatch mere force wouldn’t count for anything, and that if two Sudanese pilots, an old hand like Henry, and several senior Sudanese public servants were all not adequate to get the thing closed by cunning, then neither was I. Though I admired Henry’s neighborly pushing and shouting, I believed that in another few minutes this flight would be canceled. There would be no spare parts. The Sudan’s foreign exchange holdings, greater these days—under the bullying of the International Monetary Fund—were still not adequate to afford spares.

  At last the door closed simply in any case, with one heave of many shoulders and then a deft turn of the handle by the pilot. The group of strugglers laughed together, the vindicated Henry among them. A practical man and a doer.

  Within that villa where I developed my early admiration of Henry, we encountered besides the manager and the maker of limbs a sort of Eritrean elite—even though élite seemed to be a word forbidden among the rebels. We met men and women going to or returning from foreign missions. A pharmacist from the great Eritrean base camp of Orotta was waiting in the villa for a flight to Khartoum and thence to West Germany, where he would take delivery of a new demineralizing machine he needed for the manufacture of surgical drips. Also there that first night were two veterans, each of about forty years, one on his way to open a political lobbying office in Washington, the other the Eritrean representative in Bonn. They were lean intellectuals. They discussed Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith. The Emperor Haile Selassie had educated them, taken them grudgingly into his great university at Addis which, in their youths, like the Polish universities in the thirties with Jews, accepted only the smallest number of Eritreans, a numerus clausus of which they were members. They had postgraduate degrees from Cornell and No
rthwestern. They wore lightly the marks of another sort of education, the scar tissue of shrapnel wounds on their bare arms and neck and, in one case, forehead.

  Sitting with Henry and the girl and me at a minute table in the fly- and mosquito-ridden front hallway, they ate with a sort of military voracity. The meals were pasta, canned Italian mackerel, and the excellent tomatoes of the Red Sea coast.

  In view of the events which later seemed to turn Henry sour, it’s worth saying that on either side of this hallway were two great dormitories where the men slept on whatever bed was free—the envoys, the rebel pharmacist, the maimed prosthetic-limb maker, the veteran who managed the house, Henry, and me. Fans churned, but even the Eritreans found it too hot to sleep beneath a mosquito net.

  These beds at the guest house were considered luxurious by all old campaigners. The envoys lay on them, modest suitcases packed and ready to go beside them on the floor, and consumed copies of Time, Der Spiegel, tissuey editions of The Guardian Weekly. Wolfing the newsprint as they’d earlier wolfed the pasta.

  Upstairs was the women’s dormitory, which Christine Malmédy shared with Bufta, the cook. Christine had become fascinated by Bufta’s hair, teased out along the scalp into lines and dressed with oil or—as Bufta would confess to the girl—rancid butter. I don’t know why it didn’t small bad. In fact, the few times I came near Bufta it smelled of robust maternity. The girl seemed fascinated by Bufta’s face altogether, the slits at the side of her forehead where some sort of primitive medicine had been practiced on her in her childhood. Some of the double-degree envoys also wore such markings on their eyebrows or temples, but in Bufta’s case the effect was compounded by a tattooed Coptic cross in the middle of her forehead.