To Asmara (35 page)

At the age of fourteen Ismail had joined up with the ELF. They'd come through the villages of Barka holding seminars in his own language, Barya. He had heard for the first time in his own tongue that there were reasons other than God's will for death and hunger. The idea, this mother and siren of revolutions, took him by storm and changed him for good.

He had fought in the end in bloody, fraternal battles between the ELF and EPLF. “These days the Eritreans are a little embarrassed that it happened,” Masihi told us in a loud whisper, as if no rebels were present, as if his own interest in the question was academic. “It was terrible, but sometimes you have to fight to get control of a revolution so that it won't grow up to be crippled—or maybe become the same beast in different form, another brand of tyranny.”

Ismail had been wounded during the crazy strife. He admitted as much and casually touched the upper quadrant of his right chest. He didn't reflect on what would have seemed a pretty massive irony for someone like me: that he was now fighting beside the old enemy. With the mass of ordinary ELF soldiers he had decided some years back to join up with the EPLF on the Hallal Front. I might ponder what extraordinary beasts revolutions were, with their initials and shades of faction. But Ismail didn't waste words on observations like that. Compared to me, Ismail was brisk with history. Perhaps that was the only way to treat it.

He did tell me one thing directly, toward the end of the conversation: “Before I'm fifty I expect to see it. The end.” I wondered what he'd do when the time came, when Asmara was entered and the equitable republic proclaimed. And there he would be with nothing but his AK-47 and his memory of a Barka village remoter than the rumor of Egyptian dynasties.

For he had been a combatant for twenty years.

Henry had joined us now, and he and I listened avidly when we found out Ismail had been operating behind the lines for the last year. Henry wanted to know whether the rebels held villages in a permanent way, or did they flit in and out? And when they traveled in occupied Eritrea, he asked, did they stick to remoter tracks, or could they travel by vehicle?

You could travel with your headlights on, he told us, within a few kilometers of some of the garrison towns. He sounded boastful in a muted kind of way.

Because they could depend only on a certain level of valor from their conscripts, the Ethiopians cleared only those villages where there were no EPLF. Ismail, still speaking mainly to Masihi, went into a comedic routine, explaining in a deliberately deep, over-serious voice how the Ethiopians moved in Eritrea. First they cleared the road with infantry and tanks, a terrible peril to goats. And only after that did the convoy creep along behind. They moved at just sufficient pace to avoid being shot by their officers, but not so fast as to present a banzai image.

“Did you say
banzai
?” I asked.

“They see all those American war movies,” Masihi explained to us, again as if the rebels weren't actually present. “Someone brings in a generator and video gear, and they watch
The Dirty Dozen
!”

A small woman in military fatigues came into the hut. She sat by the door, beside Johanes. Her hair was cropped and she looked a wiry, competent little woman. She and Masihi greeted each other in an indolent, familiar way with waves of the hands. The two of them had a detailed, genial conversation in Tigrinyan. At last Masihi turned to his daughter and then to us and explained who she was.

“She's the medic for our little tour,” Masihi said. “Her name is Genet.”

We all exchanged nods and waves. For me, of course, she brought into the hut the idea of both potential succor and injury.

Then Masihi turned to our new paramedic and continued growling and teasing in Tigrinyan. It was a conversation in which we could hear the shared experience, the code of whimsy and injokes.

I watched Christine, who was herself engrossed in this exchange. She seemed so calmly exhilarated by her father's Tigrinyan performance with this little rebel paramedic that I began to speculate that perhaps it's the fathers who stay home who really attract their daughters' contempt.

Above all, I tried to imagine her in Paris, wanly holding a small daughter.

Among the other boys and girls we were meeting now, our escorts, our reliable warriors, was a pleasant-looking twenty-two-year-old who said he was from Danakil, far down in the south. His name was that universal one, Mohammed. The others began to tell us that he was taking an officers' course—military technique, science, compass map-reading. He let us know that his father spoke English but that his own was halting. In fact, he uttered his well-formed English sentences with exactly the delicacy, that equal weight on each consonant, which reminded me of Amna.

He, too, like Ismail, had been a guerrilla fish in that sea beyond the front. Tonight or tomorrow night, depending on Henry's stomach, they would do the trick again, taking us with them. I watched Masihi discussing all this. He wasn't very fussed about this prospect so unspeakable, indefinable, startling to me, and his daughter—unfussed likewise, since that was her filial duty—sat by him with her hands folded together and locked between her knees.

Despite accounts given us of life on the south side of the lines by the young veteran Mohammed and by Ismail, I thought of the far side, the “unliberated zone,” the way I used to think about the underwater when I was a child. You could not prepare yourself for it. You could not rehearse in your mind the sensation. It wasn't normal until you got there, and then it was too normal, and the danger was that you'd stay.

Henry waited on his air mattress, his dusty diary still and above all now at his side. He had the air of a man stripped down to the essentials for a large effort.

“But we have time, Mr. Henry,” Moka confided to him. “We can wait another day.”

“No,” said Henry. “No. To hell with it.”

“But if you are overcome with diarrhea in the middle of the crossing?” Moka asked.

Henry stared at him and would not answer.

I was pleased that Henry declared himself ready to go that evening. After the discussions with our barefoot doctor Genet and the boys, I would have found it difficult to sit contemplating the plunge for another day and night.

At sunset I was too stimulated to eat, even to satisfy the idea Moka seemed to have of the heroic Western appetite. At our rudimentary meal of
injera
and beans, Masihi ate slowly and functionally, and Christine seemed to imitate that style exactly. Just the same, I didn't get the impression that this was an infant imitating a grown-up. It was more that, in the company of her father, she'd discovered her own peculiar manners. I remembered how we'd clung together in Himbol under the attack of the locusts. She'd been a child without ideas in that gale of insects. I was still a child without ideas, but she'd changed.

Without any ill will, Henry asked Masihi the question I'd been too evasive to raise.

“Aren't you anxious this time? I mean, taking your daughter over there?”

Masihi drank his tea with little Eritrean sighs and considered an answer.

“If she were not here,” he said at last, obviously offended, “she would be in New York or someplace, wouldn't she? With people who don't know what they're doing!”

He flashed a brisk smile at his daughter, in case she picked up and was hurt by any apparent callousness in this reply. Far from it, Christine grinned unambiguously back. Masihi seemed very relieved. He began telling us further tales about his strange profession.

“Thank God,” he said, neatly hijacking the topic, bearing it away from the dangerous zone of the paternal and filial, “that I don't have the sixteen-millimeter camera to carry any more. I'm getting too old for that circus act. I've spent a lifetime climbing mountains at night to witness battles taking place in darkness. I say
witness
rather than
film
, because you need light to film. One night, five years ago or so, when we were crossing the front, I talked the officer around to waiting for the first light, and I got some footage, ghostly stuff, of our party slipping by the Ethiopian outposts. Not very good
technically
, but important for the archive. The grandchildren of these people, they should be able to look and say, ‘That's how our grandparents lived.' Though I don't know that grandchildren always do that if the film is technically bad. They look at poorly shot stuff and say, ‘Who are those strange people? They don't have reality!' Will there be anyone to say to them, That's old Roland Malmédy, nicknamed Masihi, and it was the best the poor old man could do at the time.' That's the puzzle of being a cameraman. The better the polemics, the worse the footage. The better the footage, the weaker the contact between the filmmaker and his material.”

He drank still more tea, as if storing up moisture. I began to do the same. After all, he'd been
there
; he was worth imitating.

As if he noticed my intentness, he said, “Anyhow, no one comes to harm beyond the front. The worst I did was get tennis elbow from hauling that brute of a camera. The invention of the portable videocam saved my life. But one thing we're wise to remember: Beyond the front, there is not always a lot to eat and there is not always a lot to drink.”

“Thank Christ!” said Henry, belching slightly.

By lantern light, we sat through nearly three hours of shelling. It seemed merely prelude to me; it did not worry me. Christine fell asleep and Masihi moved across the bunker toward me with apparent casualness and then dropped at my side.

“You must think I was rude to Henry,” he said.

I denied it, though I did think Masihi had at least sounded defensive.

“Christine has been in a psychiatric hospital. Yes, I know it's astounding, but it makes sense, doesn't it? Her baby died and her boyfriend lost interest, so what do girls do in the West? They go into hospitals. They had filled her with drugs and were promising her shock treatment. So she walked out and came to the Sudan! I mean, that's why she seems a little strange. She walked away from her medication. If she was to get electric shocks, she thought, she might as well come here. Christ! What I mean, Darcy, is that in Asmara and Addis electricity is torture. In Paris it's a treatment!”

And Christine had had exactly that air, a woman who'd renounced opiates and was relearning the world, including its strangest portions.

“I'm pleased to have an explanation,” I told him.

“Me too,” he said, shrugging.

He left me. We drowsed. Sometimes I saw Christine neatly sleeping in a corner, and sometimes again loud fire would wake me suddenly and I would see the surface of the water in the bomb casings jolting with each concussion. Yet most of the bombardment was pitched over our heads and beyond this front trench. I imagined a hail of shrapnel across that arena of churned dust where the day before the Hallal Front had trounced the Nacfa Front, 2–nil.

Moka wasn't sleeping. He kept studying his Han Suyin novel—I knew it was about an Asian girl who marries a Westerner and was bittersweet and involved the renunciation of love. It had him in. He was no longer interested simply in improving his English usage—you could see he wanted to get to the denouement before the shelling stopped and we started out.

By nine, the barrage—if that was the name for it—grew more irregular. I began to prepare my tape recorder for the journey. Moka was not distracted from his book, however. Occasionally he would pause to ask a question. For example, “What does
Hobson's choice
mean?”

Conversation began again. People stirred. Christine began to ask her father about Issayas, the leader whose representative, Askulu, we had met in She'b.

“Issayas,” said Masihi, “is impossible! They all are! Camera-shy every one. You met Askulu? The one with the baby? She is better. She did a lot of television in the West. But Issayas is terrified that the Muslims of Barka or Danakil will be disaffected if he appears on their communal video screens all the time. ‘Who does he think he is?' he fears they will ask themselves. A highlander and a Coptic Christian and an intellectual, as he is! He knows that the camera deifies, and he doesn't want to be deified, the way Mao was. He disapproves of the god Mao. Issayas is a puritan when it comes to film. He believes the camera corrupts everyone, the one behind the viewfinder, the one in focus, the one who watches. Everyone!”

And he laughed broadly. I imagined him trying to persuade the reluctant Issayas into focus on a camouflaged terrace somewhere in the mountains.

Ten minutes later, the young veteran from Danakil, Mohammed, appeared on the steps of our bunker and in his musical voice called us up to the trench.

Making No Shadows

It turned out that I had a false and highly colored idea of the kind of stealth we might need for crossing through the Ethiopian lines. The prosaic feel of it all took me by surprise. We stepped from a sap behind a great knob of rock and strolled out from behind it into the middle ground between the two trench lines. We made no shadows; the moon had not risen and the spur on which the front line ran cast its darkness across us. That aspect, at least, was the way I'd foreseen it in my melodramatic imagining.

I had no idea of the direction we took, but after five minutes I was sure we were near the road I had seen this morning, the one which came down from the Red Sea coast and passed through the Ethiopian lines. I wondered about mines but was greatly comforted by what I could see of the easy gait of our escorts, the familiar way they loped across this steep ground.

“You will hear them talking all around you,” Johanes had told us. But we were not to take any notice of that. And now I
did
hear them speaking all around, though I could see nothing—the soldiers of the Dergue speaking in casual or prosaically heightened tones. Very soon we seemed to arrive in the midst of a sort of military bazaar. Trucks passed us and we ignored them. I retained a portion of my breath, not because fear demanded it but rather because a kind of wonderment overcame me. What a cunning transit we were making. We passed within ten paces of men unloading undefined supplies by torchlight from the back of a vehicle. Henry and Christine and I, with our white faces and our barely paramilitary clothing! Yet no one took notice of us. Sometimes there would be a light, momentarily revealed from the doorway of a bunker, and a burst of shortwave radio transmitting ecstatic stringed instruments from Addis. I watched the young veteran ahead of us—the one named Mohammed. I got a glimpse of Ismail, the veteran of the ELF who'd been fighting since the age of fourteen. Genet, the medic, walked at my side; her eyes seemed to be fixed on the ground. None of these people swayed. They kept the roll of their shoulders within a restricted arc. The idea was that a normally careful gait would prevent your enemies from paying attention!