To Asmara (10 page)

All afternoon we encountered these Mercedes trucks, green-painted, each of them with a number on its flanks, the number the last thing we saw before we raised our shawls over our mouths or clamped our hats or bandannas there against the world of dust.

I couldn't avoid being touched and excited by all this afternoon traffic. The American Henry got enthusiastic, too. He leaned over from the front seat, where he was sitting with Christine, and yelled, “These guys are astounding! Running all this. And you know what? The world hates 'em for it! The world's hooked into the idea of the helpless African!” Even from his dry mouth little globules of spit sprang. And as an Eritrean truck lumbered past, dragging its mountain of dust, Henry resisted the normal courtesies of winding up his window and instead leaned out, choking, from the passenger door.

“Way to go, Africa!” he screamed.

Christine squirmed around in her seat to share a mysterious smile with me.

With all this movement, it came as a surprise to see an occasional nomad standing swathed, all except his eyes covered, in a brilliant jacket and white jellaba and turban, holding his sheathed crusader sword by the handle; a man impenetrable to dust. The owner of this empty quarter.

He drew my eyes inland, toward the beautiful Red Sea hills where, if the dust cleared, you could see strings of camels bearing nomad women through the fumes of the sun toward tents strung along the wadis. Beja people. Muslims, they spoke Arabic only for occasional convenience of trade, keeping instead an ancient hermetic language of their own for more important things. So when they faced east at sunrise and sunset, they exalted Allah in their own, stubborn, aged tongue and—so Stella informed me—watched Egyptian soap operas on battery-operated TVs in their tents.

In better days, one of the most ancient of the pilgrimage routes had run through here, through this quarter vacant on modern maps. The old route, which ran from Shendi on the Nile to Suakin, had depended on the Bejas' blessing once, and for a thousand years every pilgrim had needed their goodwill to make it to the Red Sea. But war and bad government and the mysterious intent of God had spread the Sahara right down here. And, in any case, the jet plane had altered the travel arrangements pilgrims made.

The last Sudanese town—half clapboard houses, half nomad tents—stood for mysterious reasons of its own on a random acreage of sand. It did not even serve as an authentic border post, since it was still many miles before the Eritrean border. Botany had no place there. Botany lay with its seeds deep in the earth, waiting for the rumor of moisture.

The road was fairly level and Henry was able to talk to us without screaming. “These people have it pretty good,” he told me. “The Eritreans pay the camel herders thirty dollars to take bags in by the coastal route, through the Sahel. Now and then an Ethiopian MIG shoots one up, gets the driver or the camel. Just the same, thirty dollars is big money here. Danger money. Fat city.”

I wondered how he knew all this. And all I remember is that the leanest of people loped through the town.

A wadi divided it in two, and all the goats and camels were along this watercourse, dry as it was. It was as if they had a genetic rumor in their brains that if water were ever to flow, it would be here. They'd discovered long before the Greeks that water finds its own level. They shuffled and groaned in the sage way of desert beasts.

As if by ritual, Tecleh tried to run by the police post, a hut as nondescript as the rest of this town, marked only by the flag of Sudan, pure green in the futile hope of fertility.

A young policeman came running diagonally across our path, hallooing, carrying an old .303 rifle left behind by the British.

“Ai-ai-ai!” said Tecleh, like an Italian, and pulled to a stop.

When the young policeman caught up, he opened the back doors first and inspected the paraplegic who lay on the floor beneath me. “How are you?” he asked the young veteran in English. But then he came round to the front and spoke an argumentative Arabic with Tecleh. Tecleh spoke jovial, languid Arabic back. Two hundred yards out in a mist of sand, aid trucks came and went as if the young cop did not see them. He continued to take our vehicle seriously, however. He paced up and down for a while in front of its grillwork, staring at it, then cast an eye upward at the covered luggage in the rack. Maybe, as Tecleh intimated, this was the only acting fun he'd had for weeks.

Next he put his head in the window and looked severely at Henry and Christine, and then over the back seat at me. The two barefoot doctors were exempt from his professional concern. But he seemed to be confident that the rest of us would fail at least one of the Sudan's proliferating sets of regulations.

“All of you down!” he ordered.

To leave the truck I had to roll my body along the two parallel seats, making sure that my hips didn't fall and injure the paraplegic. At last I jumped through the open door. The young man with the rifle stared at me. You couldn't tell what complicated set of political and tribal creeds, orthodoxies, prescriptions were operating in a man like that—you'd have needed to be Sudanese yourself to work it out.

Henry walked back and forth in front of the young man, muttering one- or two-word complaints in Arabic. Christine murmured to me, “But they will not stop us?”

“No,” I told her. “No. They'll just go through the rituals.”

The young policeman led us to a clapboard hut. On its shady side a more senior policeman was cooking part of the spine of a goat in a frying pan over a vivid little fire of sticks. His hands were covered with flour, but when he saw us he began to brush the flour off on his khaki pants. The campaign ribbons he wore on his chest may once have been vivid scarlets and emeralds and blues, but now they were reduced to a general umber. All martial meaning had been blasted out of them by the wind and the sun.

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?”