To Asmara (11 page)

“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 extended 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.

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.