To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Read online

  He, too, argued a little in Arabic with Tecleh before asking each of us, “You are going to Eritrea? Is that right?”

  “We’re going to the border area,” I kept saying, as Tecleh had instructed me.

  The sergeant gave Christine the slowest time of all, checking her features one by one against the photograph.

  “There is something wrong with this permit,” he said.

  “I don’t think so, effendi,” I said.

  The sergeant ignored me and spoke in Arabic to Tecleh. Tecleh then reported to us. “He says he must radio Khartoum. Hours and hours. Ai-ai-ai!”

  “Come,” the sergeant told us in English at last. “You must sit inside. And your luggage. I must see your luggage.”

  We groaned. Tecleh was arguing strenuously, but I could not understand what he was saying. Henry said to me, “He’s not opening my luggage! You know what it is? He wants to have Christine around for a few hours to look at. Probably hasn’t seen a European woman for years, if ever. I know it’s lonely on the frontier, but for Christ’s sake …”

  He patted the colorful mountaineer’s belt-cum-wallet which hung around his waist. He caught up to the sergeant, who was already in the doorway. Beyond the opened door I could see a table with a radio-transmitter, and a suit of lime green pajamas hanging from a rafter. The sergeant had some style!

  Henry spoke in a low voice to the sergeant. In contrast to last night, Henry seemed to be operating smoothly; I was sure he would bring the sergeant around. Occasionally the honorific effendi could be heard, and the rasp of the zipper on Henry’s belt. There was a flash also of highly colored Sudanese pounds.

  After more talk, the sergeant turned to us, hitting the Sudanese pounds from Henry’s hand onto the ground. “I am a Muslim,” he cried. “I am not as dishonest as Christians!”

  “Ai-ai-ai!” cried Tecleh.

  “You are from everywhere. France, the United States, the last places on earth! How do I know what you are taking to my friends the Eritreans?”

  There wasn’t any doubting his professional affront. Yet the Sudan was a place where official venality was a tradition, so Henry’s assumption that he needed paying off hadn’t been unrealistic. Nonetheless, Henry was scrabbling now on the ground for the Sudanese pounds he’d offered the sergeant.

  And what this rejection of Henry’s offer meant was hard to gauge. Did the Eritreans use the sergeant to process their foreign visitors? It would accord with their idea of politeness. Was he a just man? Did that account for his being here in the last of towns? Or did he so long to spend an hour with Christine’s pale European presence that the longing surpassed money considerations?

  Behind him now Henry waved the notes in the air, as if offering them to the world. There were no takers though. The sergeant frowned at the girl. “Then it is for just the one month,” he told her. “Some people stay longer, some for very long times. But unless I can radio, you are not permitted to remain beyond a month.”

  She gave the same kind of dangerous, negligent shrug I seemed to remember her giving the night the Norwegian officers told her she could not think of sleeping in the May Gardens. She didn’t know if she’d stay in Eritrea for a week or forever. You couldn’t tell if she was going to punish or honor her father, or both, or for how long. But obviously it wouldn’t depend on a Sudanese permit.

  “We have a green cell inside,” the sergeant told us all. “You would not like the green cell. It is very hot. When you come out of the south, you must speak to me again.”

  From an iron bedstead and palliasse standing on the same shady side of the hut as the fire, he fetched an accounts book, a rubber stamp, and an ink pad. Our names were copied from each permit into the accounts book, the dates were filled in. The sergeant consulted his watch at great length, frowning as if he wondered whether it was reliable, and then wrote the time down in Roman numerals. He was a man of some education.

  Back at the truck the barefoot doctors were changing a colostomy bag on the paraplegic. They covered him with a shawl. I listened as the patient spoke delicately to his nurses in Tigrinyan.

  Sorghum—A Gift

  Perhaps an hour later, south of the so-called border post and while we were still within the Sudan, the Sahara ended. We entered subtler, rockier country, the beginnings of Africa’s acacias. The sun fell and trees grew abruptly taller. I could see the black shapes of aid trucks in the shadows of these loftier thorn bushes and eucalypts. This was the oasis I’d heard of, Kurburaka.

  Tecleh braked and called, “Ai-ai-ai! Here we eat some injera.”

  The barefoot doctors gave the paraplegic an injection, while all the time he spoke softly to them, the patient comforting the physicians. We were led away between trees and into a clearing, to an open-sided hut of clay, clay platforms spread with rugs sofa-like inside it. Some Eritrean drivers were eating here. Others slept, each completely enclosed in his shroudlike cloak.

  Lanterns were burning in a square mud brick kitchen, and from inside the earthen oven flashed as the cooks lifted injera bread, a kind of immense, flat pancake, off its metal shaping domes. Tecleh pushed us toward a platform in the hut, and soon a plate appeared in front of us, a vast tin dish covered with the brownish bread, a pile of peppers and lentils heaped in the middle. Tecleh tore out a triangular wad of soft pancake and used it to scoop up lentils and peppers. Chewing a mouthful in an exaggerated way, he uttered patriotic gasps and groans of pleasure.

  Henry cast his eyes upward at all this overacting. “It tastes like goddam crepes made out of tears,” he muttered. “We need to remember to shit before we go.” He was eating with his mouth open to let out the heat of the peppers. “This stuff is instant arousal to the average Western bowel.”

  Henry was accurate. After we’d finished eating, Christine came to me and asked me matter-of-factly but with old-fashioned delicacy if I had tissue paper. In with the recklessness which had brought her here and which sometimes surfaced in her answers to Sudanese officials, there was something staid. You could imagine her face beneath the black hat of a church-going French spinster. And another thing: She didn’t use much slang. Perhaps her mother had protected her from movies and television, given the impact these things had had in her own life.

  Like a gratified parent anyhow, I went to my kit and tore off an excessive wad of the stuff for her. Henry and I then set off out through the perimeter of supply trucks to the farthest rim of the oasis. We stepped carefully. This was the acre assigned for the comfort of truck drivers.

  The moon had brilliantly risen. I could see every nuance of Henry’s smile when we remet. We began to stroll back toward the flicker of kerosene lamps, the robust surge of flame from the injera oven. While we were still far from all that, though, Henry swung himself up on the rear bumper bar of a truck. He wrestled with the dust-thickened tarpaulin, loosened it, and peered inside at the cargo. He took out a pocket torch and shone it. Even from ground level I could see sacks marked Sorghum—A Gift of the People of the United States.

  “Sorghum,” Henry improvised with a grin, “a gift from the Department of Agriculture, who can’t give the stuff away!”

  Then he readjusted the cover and switched off the torch.

  “I just thought I might stumble on a shipment of another form of aid. Assault rifles, for example. Gift of the PLO.”

  I felt in a not quite rational way that Henry was betraying the trust of his hosts. I wanted to put him in his place—a strange urge for a supposed journalist when faced with a good rumor.

  “A friend of mine,” I said, “an English correspondent in Khartoum, has looked into all that. According to her, it’s a myth. The West says, ‘The PLO supports them.’ The idea is that the West can then forget about them. That’s my friend’s thesis. And she’s nobody’s fool.”

  Henry gave a hard-bitten roll of the eyes. “They’ve been fighting for a quarter of a century. Who do you think does supply them, friend?”

  “They’re fighting the Ethiopians,” I said. “The biggest
army in Africa, perhaps the best supplied, and one they have consistently defeated. That’s—according to reliable report—their main source.”

  Henry laughed as if at innocence.

  “God, you’re such a smug bastard. A hard man to share a goddam desert with. No wonder your wife cleared out!”

  I felt an anger that actually transcended the desire to hit him. It was an anger at myself for having mentioned Bernadette to him that night up the coast, in the guest house at Port Sudan. Until I escaped him and went to witness the ambush beyond the front line, he could harry me all the way through Eritrea with my wife’s name. He hadn’t needed to hear it, I hadn’t needed to utter it. Yet I’d paid it out freely to him.

  “That’s the lowest bloody card to play,” I told him.

  “I suppose it is,” he admitted, suddenly and erratically the disarming midwest boy again.

  “My source argues,” I persisted, “that they’re capturing so much Russian equipment from the Ethiopians that if it were known in Moscow to more than a few self-serving bureaucrats, it could …”

  “What d’you say? Bring the Russian government down?”

  And he chuckled again.

  “I think you ought at least suspend judgment,” I said irrationally, “till you’ve seen the bloody place.”

  “In Africa,” he advised me in an enraging big-brother sort of way, “you don’t get any marks for going sentimental on people.”

  Worse still, he seemed to think this was a great aphorism.

  “A hard man to share a goddam desert with,” Henry had said randomly. But like many random insults it struck accurately. Because once, in Fryer River, that had been my exact conceit. I’d thought I was a wonderful man for deserts; I’d thought I had a gift for them, for the massive and complicated stretches of earth and the rivers in which no visible water ran. Returning to the area around the Kurburaka cookhouse, I seemed to experience the dry, fiery redolence of Fryer River, and I was translated there again, under the same moon, fatally determined to see Bernadette’s absolutely untypical Fryer River misery as a phase, a fit, a pet, a chemical spasm, a spate of ego.

  The intimate flavor of her unhappiness returned to me there in Kurburaka. Yet I hadn’t acknowledged it at the time. Friends of ours, visitors to Fryer River, found themselves sitting through our arguments, which they noticed more acutely than I did. My line was that this was the competent, black-sweatered social worker Bernadette Yang, star of the Legal Service. She must know the tribal women would change as she got closer to them, that she would ovecome what I chose to call “their shyness,” that they’d greet her in sisterhood in the end.

  One old friend said later that both of us knew what the truth was but were forbidden by our ideas of orthodoxy and heresy from stating it. The easy racist/nonracist division of humanity, which we’d used as a tool in our youth, a sort of adjustable spanner of debate in our work for city Aborigines, wasn’t of any use to us here. The clear truth was that both the tribal men and the tribal women did not want her to be Chinese. They had known Europeans close up for only a few generations and had come to accept them as priests of a world scheme mysterious yet parallel to their own. Someone Chinese did not fit this parallel system. The question was: Where was her authority?

  Those tribal people who went to Alice Springs knew that the few Chinese there lived on the fringe. So what did Bernadette Yang have to give the Fryer River population; what power could she exercise in the world’s mechanics?

  Bernadette wanted me to admit all this now, to admit that in Fryer River she was not so much a pariah as someone who lacked a place. It’s very likely an admission would have been enough to satisfy her. But out of some strange, naive loyalty to the tribal council, the source of my most wonderful posting—because of some desire to cast them as Western liberals—I avoided saying it. I was scared it would bring me to a choice between Bernadette and this most perfect job, my stature as a desert wonder.

  For I was too good a man at deserts to risk being disqualified and sent back home just because my wife didn’t fit the desert view. So I managed to believe that they’d make room for her in the end. This mental trick was my first betrayal of her, and probably the decisive one. It did go on for a long time, for unhappy months, and all the time it was apparent that we both understood and did not say anything.

  Visitors to the settlement recall a dinner with wine. For though Fryer River was dry, the community advisers were allowed to bring in their own small cellars of wines with them. Anyhow, at this crucial dinner, Bernadette began to talk in a hostile way about the women’s strange eye movements and modes of walk.

  Three miles southeast of the trailer was a gap in the mountains. The lovely, arid peaks either side of it seared the iris of the eye at noon, but in the late afternoon they became a radiant violet. The ordnance map name of the place was Stanley’s Gap, but its name on the millennial tribal map was Panitjilda.

  Bernadette had learned that the women didn’t only never go through that pass. They averted their eyes from the sight of it as well. Their view of the south was limited therefore. But so was their view of the north. For on the north side of the settlement stood a shaly hill, Namjuta, bound together with desert acacias and grevilleas. And women, Bernadette had found, didn’t look at that place either. Pressing one of the older women for an answer, she’d been told, “That’s a man’s place.”

  “How long have these people lived here?” she asked me at table, in front of the visitors. “At least twenty thousand years. And in all that time women haven’t been allowed to look at Namjuta or Stanley’s Gap! Half the world’s been denied them. And this is somehow an ideal tribal condition!”

  I scratched together the sense of pique a spouse feels whenever the marriage fight is frankly declared in front of visitors. Of course I was disappointed in her, but having so badly disappointed her myself I couldn’t say so. I began to argue back. The tribal world, I said, was made up of the sacred and forbidden on the one hand, and the sacred and accessible on the other. “If you do away with that system,” I argued, “you’ll end up with the sort of exiled trash we dealt with in the city.”

  “Ah, so now our city clients were trash! I’ll tell you, they had one bloody thing up on this crowd! They could look to any point of the horizon without fear of dropping dead.”

  “But you knew!” I accused her. I wished that all the people at table knew how strongly she’d pushed me toward coming here. “You knew that there’s this conflict. It isn’t news to you that the tribal setup’s at odds with some of the usual democratic impulses. For Christ’s sake, it’s at odds with the law of common bloody assault.”

  For the tribal law, as I sometimes informed visitors, countenanced occasional bloody punishments and even executions for crimes such as the violation of blood laws—for sex within forbidden relationships, even for the utterance of the secret name of an ancestor. And it was true that Bernadette was familiar with all that, that in Melbourne, surrounded by semi-tribal men and women drowning in the European strangeness, she’d yearned for that tribal clarity, that desert sureness.

  But now she began to speak like a supreme European. That’s what the tribal council and their wives—without knowing it—had forced her to. She used the old-fashioned term darkness—to mean darkness of culture. In her city life she would have pitied anyone who spoke like that. “If anyone else lived under the same sort of darkness these people do,” she accused me, “you’d feel sorry for them. Yet you go on pretending to envy them.”

  I kept on insisting that I did envy them, the ones who still had a connection to the mysteries.

  I think the friends were pleased when it was time for them to leave and return south.

  Our video machine was what kept us afloat: video films ordered dozens to the batch from a great warehouse in Alice Springs. Between forbidden Namjuta and proscribed Panitjilda we watched French, American, British, and Australian films. Even with a complicated film like Klaus Maria Brandauer’s Mephisto, our discussions e
xtended only to good/bad, enjoyable/not enjoyable. That most robust and least dangerous form of marital argument, the argument over the merits of a film, had become dangerous for the Darcys.

  As friends would discover later, during a bitter and vinous account of events delivered by me at a dinner in a Melbourne restaurant, it was in the desert winter of 1985 that a Pitjantjara man named David Burraptiti got out of jail in the town of Berrima in the tropic north of the Territory and came south to Fryer River in the desert, where his clan lived.

  The tribal council, I could see at once, didn’t welcome the return of Burraptiti. They considered him a troublemaker. They were very practical about troublemakers; from their harsh desert history they were used to sloughing off those dangerous to the clan. They would have preferred it if Burraptiti had stayed in Alice until his next break-and-enter or car theft took him back to the Territory’s jail. But without incurring a blood debt, that is, without taking an expiating wound, they could not deny him access to his tribal ground.

  Burraptiti arrived home by truck. He was tall but carried a jail flabbiness around his middle. He flashed a slow, dangerous smile which the Fryer River people seemed to remember well but professed not to like. Yet often, at the sight of him, his kinswomen clustered around him despite themselves. Their tongues shrilled. They sang like birds, shifting the swatches of pitchuri, the desert narcotic which they chewed, from one cheek to another.

  Burraptiti arrived with half a dozen cases of beer, contrary to the tribal council’s anti-liquor ordinance. I noticed the council did not want to talk to Burraptiti about it. I found myself cajoling them into enforcing their own law. They seemed to have a terror of any argument which might come to blows. Every blow had to be repaid by a kinsman of the person struck. Great wars began that way. For that reason the Fryer River police aide had been recruited from far away, in the desert of South Australia, a man who had no kin in the Fryer River area, no blood debts to pay back.