To Asmara: A Novel of Africa Read online

  Reluctantly the aide confiscated Burraptiti’s six cases. As it was done, Burraptiti whimsically saluted him.

  Later, by secret arrangement, the elders got the cans back from the South Australian and helped Burraptiti drink them. It was their concession to him, their placation. They didn’t want him to have a grievance. He was dangerous enough without that.

  Everyone seemed delighted when Burraptiti went hunting with an uncle of his and came back after three days, a speared red kangaroo carried effortlessly across his shoulders. Yet they all knew this phase of innocence would come to a close. There would be some attack by fist or bludgeon against one of the Pintubi or against one of Burraptiti’s kinsmen; it would probably be a fight over a woman. To avoid punishment Burraptiti would then flee to Alice by vehicle and commit a new crime, and the cycle of imprisonment, return, blood, and ejection would commence once more.

  About this time, when the tribal council was expecting the worst of Burraptiti, a young anthropologist, one of a team charting tribal sacred sites, arrived at the Fryer River strip by light aircraft. The anthropologist, several of the tribal elders and council, and I all spent three days traveling together in the country to the west of Fryer River, crossing the barely populated ground on the edge of the Gibson Desert where tribal boundaries and mysteries overlapped the administrative border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

  I was delighted and engrossed by these days. At the very least they were a release from the marriage impasse. But the journey wasn’t mere flight. We visited men’s mystery caves by dry riverbeds. We came to awesome canyons where the birds and even the sun at its sizzling height seemed to convey an absolute message and call up power from the stones. We stopped at springs concealed by overhanging rock from the heroic evaporation of the sun and populated by the holy and ever returning dead.

  At night we camped in more neutral ground, where the gravity of spirits wasn’t as fierce as in some of the places the young anthropologist was marking on his map. Under dry, cold stars we slept without tents in comfortable bedrolls called swags.

  The holy places restored me to my full status as a good man for deserts. I would have been pleased if the work had continued for months. But the elders knew the country so intimately that even over such immense spaces the task was quickly done.

  On the way back to Fryer River, the party met up with a Pintubi tribesman and his wife by a broken-down Holden. Freddy Numati, the elder-mechanic, went to work on its carburetor. The Pintubi man began to speak of what had happened in Fryer River while our party was gone. Someone had been arrested and locked up by the police aide, he said—I could not pick up the whole story, and I presumed the old man meant Burraptiti had been locked up. But as the car owner spoke further, the elders’ glances began to slew away from me.

  As the three trucks of our map-making group reentered the settlement at Fryer River, I noticed an old, near-blind man sitting cross-legged on the ground near the petrol pumps of the settlement store. His mouth was open and gave out a wail. He snatched up handfuls of red dust and threw them into the air, as if—I felt even then—into the eyes of potent, unleashed spirits. I knew at once what had been done in my absence.

  I expected to find the trailer empty, and I did, a few half-read books and half-watched videos strewn around the living room.

  I felt a frightful panic as I rushed to the settlement lockup, a small prefabricated shed standing like an outhouse behind the council chambers. I did not enter the place. Instead I called for the police aide to come out, and the man emerged, moving with delicacy and with turned-aside eyes. I had been dealing with averted eyes all day and had been undermined by them. Now I understood how Bernadette had been thwarted by averted eyes for months on end.

  The police aide told me that one of the Pintubi men, out hunting, had seen Bernadette two miles beyond Stanley’s Gap, in the holy ground of Panitjilda. She had been wearing a swimsuit top and shorts and had been sitting in the shade of a boulder outside a cave rendered powerful through the death of a clever man there. They always used that term—clever man. Or else they said important man, important woman. They never said when he or she had died, whether it was ten, a hundred, ten thousand years past. For the time of clever men was circular; or else it was two parallel snakes of time, the past and the present, and they kept on interweaving, according to the Aboriginal idea of Tjuparata, Dreaming.

  I had always considered this tribal system enchanting and enriching. I’d believed it had a harsh edge, of course, but only for the initiates. For me it was religion and magic and poetics, and I believed it would not strike back at me.

  Bernadette had worked out a way to make it strike back. At me. A good man in a desert! I felt severely and intimately the shock of being alien so soon after, as a brother to the tribal council, I’d visited mystery caves and drunk from holy pools.

  I listened to the police aide explain with gentle apology that he’d locked her up to show that he was doing something. “Otherwise the old blokes were so upset they might do something themselves.”

  The aide was a reasonable fellow despite his few Wild West affectations—a lawman’s roll of the hips as he walked, an inverted set of U.S. Army sergeant’s chevrons sewn on his shirt. He was worth listening to. He knew perfectly how grievances got started in this sort of place.

  I limited my demands therefore to seeing Bernadette. He led me inside. She sat on a cot beyond the bars pretending to read the Heinrich Böll novel she’d taken on her sun-bathing excursion to the clever man’s cave. By now she’d hung a blouse around her long neck and over her shoulders, but she had not done up the first two buttons: the swimsuit top could be seen. She blinked furiously and looked up at me. She looked shrunken inside her beach clothes; her breasts hung loosely inside the bikini. She looked up fiercely at me; I could tell then, I think, that I wanted some change of soul. But I could not tell what that change of soul might be—unless it was to attack the police aide, take the keys by force, liberate her, and flee the settlement with her. But that was impossible, of course. Good men in deserts didn’t behave as erratically as that.

  “You’re the lawyer,” she told me. “How do you think this would stand up under habeas corpus in the High Court of Australia?”

  I pushed my hand through the bars, cheap comfort which she wouldn’t take.

  “I would have thought a husband would tear the bars down,” she told me lightly, exempting me with irony from that sort of primitive excess. It was no use telling her that was my impulse, and in any case the police aide made it all beside the point by unlocking the door at once.

  Bernadette did not move. I asked her to come home, but she sat on stubbornly on the camp bed in the open cell. At last, at her own pace and taking no notice of my coaxing, she got up and walked out of the cell and out of the lockup.

  By now the police aide was thoroughly embarrassed for me, for Bernadette Yang had compounded her Chinese face by becoming an unmanageable wife. On the way home she walked about five paces behind me. I looked at the afternoon light and the mauve shadows of trailers, clinic, schoolhouse, desert oaks, and mountains and, frightened as I was, thought it perverse of her not to be happy here. And not only was she unhappy. She was guilty of sacrilege, of ritual vandalism. I knew but hadn’t yet acknowledged that she’d invalidated us at Fryer River.

  Nearly back to our trailer, she called out a question. “Do you think that that troublemaker, Burraptiti, would be worried by what I’ve done?”

  I was enraged at her for dragging Burraptiti, who—apart from her—was Fryer River’s other great problem, into the question. I told her Burraptiti was spoiled, that his opinion did not count tribally.

  Bernadette said, “He knows better than to divide the world up into things you’re allowed to look at and things you can’t!”

  I made the speech she probably expected, the only one my status as good desert man would permit me, compassionate and firm. I said I knew exactly why she had done it. She was trying to get th
em to take her seriously. I pleaded that I had been unthinking. I pledged my concern for her happiness and so on. But I could already see that she was not just chagrined, not just a discontented wife. The desert people and I, between us, had started in her a malignant anger, a sort of inoperable hurt.

  Freddy Numati, the elder who was also a mechanic, came to the trailer that evening. The tribal council wanted to speak to Mrs. Darcy, he said. He, too, was apologetic, after the manner of the police aide. The council had to have a talk with her, he said.

  I asked him to wait at the door and went inside to the bedroom, where she lay with the Böll book, still blinking frantically at the print.

  “If you don’t want to go, then I’ll resign and leave,” I said.

  I risked touching her arm near the elbow, but it was a creaky gesture, a gesture between strangers. Bernadette became very calm, almost amused.

  “So you didn’t tell him to get lost?” she asked simply.

  I argued lamely that I couldn’t tell Numati to go because Numati was still my employer and hers. We could resign, the two of us, and go and tell Numati as much and tell him we would leave at once. Or, of course, she could face a sort of quasi-judicial inquiry of the elders. At which she might be disciplined verbally. But never bodily! I would never permit that! And anyhow, they were worldly enough to know that that was not possible, that that would attract the police.

  Secretly, at a basic level, I thought she deserved to face them. Her perversity had earned it for her.

  In the end Bernadette consented to face them. She even insisted that it was what she wanted. “It’ll be a change to have them actually talking to me,” she said, smiling up at me. The smile was strange, but at the time I chose to read it as reconciliation. I repented. I urged her we should tell Numati to go away. But now she wouldn’t hear of it. Or maybe I’d stated my loyalty to her too late in the argument.

  I sat at the back of the council room. I discovered that someone had spread the instruments of punishment haphazardly around the platform the council sat on. I could see spears, their side-prongs bound onto the main shaft with kangaroo sinew; clubs molded from branches and roots. Freddy Numati began reluctantly explaining in a low voice that a woman who went over to that place, beyond Panitjilda, had to pay a blood debt—otherwise so many bad things would happen the world could not contain them. They did not want a blood debt from her, however. Yet if she did it again, they would have to kill her. Numati pleaded with her please not to do it again, that it half killed the old people. Then he said, “You watch, some of those old people will die now!”

  Bernadette began to weep, as if contrite. She stood up and made a formal apology. The council asked her to pay them $250.

  “My husband has the money,” she told them with a sudden steeliness. “He’ll pay you.”

  I took her home and stayed with her the rest of the next day. I cooked meals and opened a bottle of wine.

  In the middle of a meal she said, “They let me off without physical punishment. But you can bet the old men sang me to death. I know the old men do that.”

  I held her in my arms but she hung limply. There was now a core in her which somehow refused to be protected, at least by me.

  That night David Burraptiti stole the clinic sister’s four-wheel drive. As would later be discovered, he drove it northeast on tortuous tracks toward the main road to Darwin and the tropic north, where he had spent his prison term. Bernadette, I discovered, waking alone later in the night, appeared to have vanished with him.

  Since I was a good man in a desert and she, for reasons of her own, was refusing to honor that fact, I believed that this fantastical escape of hers was like the Panitjilda visit, a gesture of vengeance. Burraptiti would treat her with creaky politeness, and she would call from Alice Springs to ask me to collect her.

  The Road to Eritrea: Meeting Julia

  Beyond the oasis where Henry and I had our quarrel about arms supplies, the road was a scarcely perceived rumor. We followed riverbeds clogged with lumps of stone in which you could read, if you had some sort of divine sense, a history of Africa’s uncertain rains. The insides of the truck hit us fierce blows on elbows and shoulders, the sides of the head. The paraplegic retched, and I could smell the thin, piteous stench of his bile.

  In a depression between hills, an impala, exquisite in the truck lights, danced in front of us. Tecleh braked so that we would not pass it. He and the barefoot doctors began arguing wildly. The barefoot doctors were not impressed by the impact of Tecleh’s driving on their patient. Tecleh, I could tell however, was impressed by the presence of meat.

  Twenty paces up a defile, the impala stood on its sublime legs waiting for the outcome of the debate between Tecleh and the others. It considered the truck. Its eyes glittered in the diffused light with that tranquil timidity of herbivores, that same level inquiry I’d seen in the eyes of kangaroos who leap away a distance and then can’t resist turning to verify their first assessment. If they’re being chased by the Pitjantjara or Pintubi, it’s the second look that does them in. They perish for the sake of knowledge, as the impala might, too.

  Tecleh and one of the two paramedics carried the main weight of the discussion, while the other barefoot doctor passed the information to the sick man on the floor. For the paraplegic was germane to the debate. The impala could not fit where he was, in the back, and the roof was taken up by the equipment of Henry, Christine, and me.

  Before the barefoot doctors were ready for a conclusion, Tecleh opened his door, jumped to the ground—a movement which caused the eyes of the impala to flinch yet did not make it run—and withdrew from beneath his seat one of those Russian automatics called AK-47s.

  This was exactly the sort of weapon whose provenance Henry and I had been arguing about an hour before. If Stella’s judgment was to be believed then somewhere—in some skirmish or in one of the Eritreans’ sweeping triumphs over the Ethiopians—it had been captured. Its wooden stock was reinforced with tape. You saw such taping in photographs of rebels bearing AK-47s the world over, but I did not know why it was done, for style or for some technical reason. Tecleh in any case raised this taped stock to his shoulder. Not a wastrel, he set the lever to single shot.

  I hated this moment. I felt the unaware blood of the beast swelling in my own throat. I looked at the girl then, the young Parisienne. I half hoped that she, influenced by the vegetarian fashion of her generation, might burst from the truck and protect the lovely creature.

  My ears shuddered and I saw Christine Malmédy’s body jerk. The impala, lit by the moon and naked under the headlights, showed just one frightful rosette at the side of its neck. Its hind legs were swept sideways from beneath it. It knelt forward and toppled aside with the exact philosophic grace I had seen in the animals native to Fryer River. It was as if they, the kangaroo there and the impala here, subscribed to the same propositions as the flesh-eating hunters.

  The barefoot doctors were full of protest. They were clearly asking again where the meat was to be carried. Henry began yelling across the front seat at Tecleh. I suppose he had hunted as a boy and was excited. “Tie it to the goddam hood! You’ve got rope, don’t you?”

  Tecleh gathered up the dead animal and toted it back by the pits of its arms and legs, and Henry had already left the truck to join in the joyous business of roping it to the front of our vehicle.

  The paraplegic, from his position on the floor beneath my legs, could only have heard what was going on, but he seemed to be greatly cheered. He made some delicately spoken joke which caused the barefoot doctors to laugh as well.

  As the road became rockier still, the impala’s horns jolted, putting up too late a defense.

  The moon had risen, and ahead of us, up a bluely splendid valley, I noticed a stalled truck. Tecleh dimmed our lights and rolled us toward it but at a tangent. From its shadow emerged an African. There was also a pale, elderly European woman there, walking back and forth between the levered-back bonnet of the truck and its tailga
te, fetching and carrying tools.

  “Ai-ai-ai!” said Tecleh. “Where do these people come from?”

  “It depends,” said Henry. “Are we in Eritrea yet?”

  Tecleh said, “We are in the mountains, and so we are in Eritrea.”

  The vehicle we drew up beside was small, Japanese, and reliable, mechanically apt for Africa. Yet in another sense it was the very worst for the country. Apart from the driver’s cabin the rear was all canvas, cleated down but offering no answer to the dust.

  This time everyone except the paraplegic got down. I levered my way painfully once more to the rear doors. I kept murmuring “Excuse me” to the crippled veteran, whose eyes had been bludgeoned by the road into a sort of barely focused muteness. By the time I got the door open and had landed on the stony ground and moved to the front of the truck, Henry, Christine, the unidentified African, and the elderly European woman had already made their introductions.

  The woman was robust, square-faced, frankly gray-haired. She stepped forward at once and offered her hand to me.

  “I’m Julia Ashmore-Smith from the Anti-Slavery Society,” she said in the distrait manner of the well-bred Englishwoman. Her voice had all the exasperated toniness which I, in my colonial soul, identified with British hubris. In her empire, though it no longer existed, she was the Amhara, and Henry and I the Somalis.

  “I mean,” she said distractedly to no one in particular, “we’re going to need a new distributor.”

  Henry winked at me. “Julia’s come in from the west.” He already knew that much. “From Kassala. The cheek of this girl!” He turned back toward the woman. “I know there’s some tough roads out there, ma’am.”

  “We’ve had no real trouble till now,” said Julia Ashmore-Smith. She seemed to resent Henry’s jovial patronage.

  “But you were shot at,” Henry said, stepping forward and raising his hand to two rents, putative bullet holes, in the canvas at the rear of the truck.