To Asmara (14 page)

As he led us deftly up a ravine, Henry's duffel on his shoulder, Moka gave out a cruel wheezing noise. I found out later that this noise was an after-effect of a chest wound he had suffered in battle.

Gentleman Salim

The “guest house”—just as Stella Harries had already described it to me—stood on the steep slope above the floor of the valley of Orotta. I suppose you could call the structure a semi-bunker. Its back wall was dug into the mountain. A terrace, paved with dry stones and camouflaged with a vine, stood at its front. It was rumored to be protected also by its own medium flak gun and gun crew. We couldn't see them. They were believed to be entrenched under the brow of the mountain higher up.

The guest house possessed three bedrooms, among which were distributed six of Eritrea's rare hospital beds. And in a washhouse by the terrace we took turns to rinse off the sweat of the night journey and to squat over a noisome little porcelain bowl inset in the floor, the only flush toilet in the entire besieged regions of Eritrea. I didn't expect Henry to betray any sign of distaste, nor perhaps even Lady Ashmore-Smith, since she too had long experience of Africa. But again I was intrigued at the lack of complaint from Christine. The truth is that I would have been consoled by any signal of revulsion she gave—I was so close to giving some myself. But there was no flicker as she came out of the washroom, gleaming with soap and with the bandanna she had worn to combat the stench still frankly knotted around her neck.

We were awakened at noon and harried by Moka, our skeletal minder, from our beds and to the dining room. The air had taken on the consistency of an element in its own right—a mix of fire and hot mist. Angles of fierce sunlight fell down the pit of clay in which most of the house sat and sliced across the windowsills, which held no glass and at which giant African wasps played.

The cook placed dishes on the table before us. She had her hair dressed in those long thin strands which Christine Malmédy had so admired in Bufta, the cook in Port Sudan. Moka sat beside Christine. He spoke with that bent overearnestness of his, his legs crossed and ending in army boots which looked immense on his narrow frame, his shoulders jerking for emphasis inside his shirt.

“There is no news yet of where your father is. He has trained six cameramen, but they are all busy all the time, up and down that front trench on both sides. And they do not only the front. They film the motor pool in Hishkub, and the road building in Upper Senhit and the agriculture at Agrae, and the great food dump at Jani. I might send you to A to meet him, but he might already be in B. Or might already be back in Orotta …”

Moka looked at the other guests as if a meeting with Masihi was also their chief reason for coming into Eritrea. “You will be very safe. We will keep you safe from the MIGs.”

The girl gave her normal half-smile of dazed expectation. She began to eat heartily of what was at table—the
injera
bread with the strangeness of dhurra grain in it, the bowl of scalding lentils and peppers, and the goat ribs.

“I wouldn't touch that goat, missie,” Henry advised her. “The goat meat does for
me
, every time!”

“Don't be mischievous, Mr. Henry!” said Lady Julia, deliberately selecting a rib and biting into it. “You must be aware that goat meat is the highest delicacy here. A food for weddings, as you know, and for victories!”

“Well, I'm sad to report that my life's a little short on weddings and victories. And my stomach knows it.”

Lady Julia composed the lines of her mouth subtly, and I knew she was genuinely annoyed. “It doesn't behoove us to ignore the significance of goat meat here, at this table. The Ethiopian army confiscated half Eritrea's herds, and even when it didn't, drought killed nearly all the rest. People with sixty goats lost fifty, people with a hundred lost eighty-five. The one we are eating now must have come through the drought of 1985. It may have seen the poor tribes of the Bani Amir wasting away, it may have seen Mensa children die, and young girls of the Saho tribe. And here we are making an ungracious fuss and lavatorial jokes about being fed the ribs of such a goat! The flesh of an animal hero! As if we were being fed leavings!”

She swallowed and adjusted her chin.

Henry said in a lazy, small voice, “Feel free to indulge yourself on my share.”

But it
was
true that Henry
had
spent all those years in Ethiopia and must have been aware of the festive meaning of goat meat. His feverish, bad-child table manners had some other meaning than ignorance.

Moka kept on urging everyone to attack the bowl. Lady Ashmore-Smith and myself set to in a tentative sort of way. Christine chewed the meat calmly, experimentally, again familiarizing herself with a taste from her father's chosen world. After we'd been eating for some time, or—like Henry—had shown we didn't wish to touch the meat, Moka himself tucked in, gnawing the bones with an African voracity.

At this stage of our uneasy meal a tall, portly, Arab-looking man entered the room. He was dressed like an old-fashioned Arabian businessman, in a turban, a painfully clean white shirt and tie, the coat of a gray business suit. Instead of trousers, a swath of white linen was tied around his waist and hung to his calves. You couldn't have picked him as a rebel except for Eritrean plastic sandals on his feet. His large features were far lighter than the complexions of most Eritreans. Only later did I think about the oddity of his dressing European from neck to waist and Arab for the rest. No other Eritrean I had seen dressed this way, so I wondered if the man was a visitor from Saudi Arabia, a dealer of some kind?

“Good afternoon, good afternoon,” he said in English, the English of older Africans who once had lived in British colonies. His voice was melodious and breathy. “Ah, I had heard there was goat!”

You couldn't guess what series of Red Sea genetic contingencies had made his face; what balance of Semitic, Hamitic, Cushitic, Turkish, European was represented there. He was about sixty years old, an age most Eritreans didn't manage to achieve, and had an old-fashioned gravity.

“May I introduce myself? My name is Salim Genete. I am an Eritrean, but I live in Saudi Arabia, in Medina, where I do business and help—as far as I can—the cause of my Eritrean brothers and sisters.” He eyed the bowl of meat. “Ai-ai-ai! How remarkable!”

He, too, set to work on the
injera
and the bluish goat flesh-and-bone left in the bowl.

We introduced ourselves. When it was the Englishwoman's turn, she used her unadorned name. Henry said, maybe to embarrass her, “Julia's a Lady or a Dame or some such.”

The question of what Lady Ashmore-Smith should be called all at once seemed to dominate. But I didn't even know how Henry had found out about it. I hadn't told him.

“Please,” said the Englishwoman. “I am not a Dame. I do hope this business is not going to become an issue!” Then she uttered her real name.

“Oh,” said Salim Genete, considering the wad of goat meat he held in his hand, “so your husband was a baronet? Or a life peer?”

The question caused Henry and me to exchange grins and a few archings of the eyebrows. It wasn't the sort of matter you'd expect rebels generally to involve themselves in.

“My husband,” Lady Julia told Salim Genete, “was a District Commissioner in the Sudan. He was first knighted. But after retirement he was involved in Foreign Office work in what was then Rhodesia, and was made a life peer. So I have been both Lady Julia and Lady Ashmore-Smith, and since my poor husband, Denis, died seven years ago, and since I have little right to any title myself, I suggest, Mr. Genete, that you call me Julia.”

“Not at all,” said Salim, a stickler. “I know from my youth, when Massawa on the Red Sea was a British port and when my father entertained distinguished guests, that
Lady Julia
is the correct mode of address for the wife or relict of a life peer. And that if you were simply the wife of a knight, the proper mode would instead be
Lady Ashmore-Smith
. I'm not incorrect in my memory of these forms, am I?”

Lady Julia herself seemed amused.

“You have it absolutely exactly,” she told him. “Though it
is
strange to hear such a rundown on the protocols of address from a member of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.”

I tried to memorize these nuances of title Salim Genete had acquainted us with, for my future dealings with the Englishwoman. I could see the girl smiling faintly but engaged in the same effort.

“And so,” said Salim, eating energetically, copiously, but giving an impression of restraint, of appetite under control, “you have found our corner of the globe and our struggle. Do you think our guest house a little impoverished?”

Lady Julia denied it.

“Let me tell you,” Salim Genete continued, “that sadly this is an Eritrean palace. One day we will enter our holy and much desired city of Asmara. There, evening prayer will be called from the Eritrean mosque, and benedictions from the cathedral. And you will see better things then. But for the moment … I am afraid this is the best. Yet I trust you will discover we are not an uncultivated people. Politics have done this to us. The politics of
other
folk. Imagine then what politics do to the defenseless seed in the earth. Ai-ai-ai! But come, eat these delicious lentils and the goat meat!”

Moka and Salim Genete continued to eat after the rest of us had stopped. Soon they noticed, however, that for the visitors the meal was over.

“Ai,” said Salim. “The meat is good for my friend Moka. It builds him up against malaria, which is very dangerous in his case because of his wounds. Shall we drink our tea in the open?”

Outside, on stone benches draped with colored cloth and understuffed cushions, we drank from a thermos of frighteningly sweet tea. Salim squinted at the sun through the camouflaging trellis covered with some flowering plant. “From Khartoum to Kuwait the just are asleep,” he murmured. “Because it is so very hot …”

It was at the height of this African heat that I noticed particular Eritreans—
bureaucrats
, I suppose you'd call them—in the defile below the guest house. In oddments of Western clothing, often paramilitary in appearance, they would emerge singly now and then from a particular hole in the ground and move toward another. For the first time I began to spot the cunningly tucked away windows and air vents of these places. There was, for example, a bunker high up on the slope to our right, and another below us. From it I could hear an occasional burst of conversation, a groan, a snore.

One official who moved toward us up the defile was a lean woman with a turban loosely tied around her dark neck-length hair. She wore an Arab-style shawl around her neck, a striped shirt and jeans. At the large drums of fresh water just below the guest house she paused. She found an empty milk can and filled it from the drum on her left, the one intended for washing rather than drinking.

Carrying the can of water in both hands, she climbed to the bunker off to the side of the guest house, the bunker I'd barely discerned ten minutes before but which now seemed obvious, permanent as an apartment block.

I was engrossed by her easy glide. All the people of the Horn are impressive movers, even though they mightn't have stable surfaces to move on. In profile she was exquisite, lean-featured, her skin blue-brown. Her style was what you'd call “Italianate.” I don't think this was due to Italian genetic influence—a lot of people in the Horn happen to carry such fine-lined features. It's one of those little ironies of history that the Italians should get a colony called Eritrea in 1889 and see an African echo of their own finest faces staring back at them.

As I watched her move from the drum to the bunker, I thought at first she was very young, perhaps twenty-two or -three years, and then I wondered if she wasn't a mature woman.

Even after she reached the door of the other bunker I didn't lose sight of her. She stayed in the recessed doorway. I noticed now that she was wearing, as if they were items of Milanese
haute couture
, the Eritrean plastic sandals, manufactured in a bunker-factory somewhere near here. She hooked her right leg up on the knee of her left and poured a thin thread of water over both foot and sandal. Having rinsed the day's dust off the right foot, she now washed the left. In posture, in delicacy, the two rinsings were a perfect mirror of each other. I looked at Lady Ashmore-Smith-cum-Julia, but she was talking to Salim Genete and had failed to notice the girl bureaucrat's almost ritual elegance.

The woman used the last of the water on her forearms and hands, thrusting the hands out full length, treating them to no more than a narrow, thrifty flute. Rhythmically, she kneaded the moisture between her fingers. Then she put the can down, raised her hands briefly to the sun to dry them, ran the palm and the back of each hand once across the tail of her shawl, unwound her turban, shook out her hair, and disappeared into the bunker.

Salim was speaking drowsily to Christine Malmédy. “I saw your father two weeks ago in Himbol. He was filming the locusts. A plague, as in the Bible. And as in the Bible brought down upon us by Pharaoh.”

“For
Pharaoh
, I suppose,” murmured Henry with an edge of cynicism, “read Mengistu.”

“Ai-ai-ai,” said Salim, “Mengistu. There is a fleet of planes for spraying plagues of insects, but the enemy will not guarantee that the planes will be safe from fire. He does not want us to be saved from this plague; he does not want us to be saved in any way. But let us not be too concerned about that for the moment. Rest now. We must all rest.”

In that heat, in the wake of the ablutions of the woman official, I had in fact found Salim's little recital damn near narcotic.

“When it is dark,” he continued, as if telling a story to exhausted children, “you will see wonders in the sides of mountains. You have read
Peer Gynt
? You have heard of the Erle King? This is Peer Gynt in Africa, all this. When we have Asmara, we will remember these bunkers as magic caverns.”