To Asmara (40 page)

“Listen, Darcy,” she said. “Don't dare follow me.”

And I didn't. I lacked the daring.

The beautiful child, with the double burden and glory of its races lying coiled in it, clucked a little as she pushed it away and out through the doors. I watched them until they paused in the parking area by a riotously dented and discolored Holden. The body of the car had been scraped back for a new paint job it was unlikely ever to receive. I realized that she had not told me the child's name.

I used my visit to Darwin to write a few spiritless articles about the supposed exotic north for
The Melbourne Age
. Then I returned to the more staid and permanent south.

I would wait somewhere else than in my hometown for Bernadette's eventual call. In the meantime I wanted to find a place where my tribal credit had not been withdrawn. I wanted to go—perhaps—to Africa.

All I did at the campfire that night was stay sober and offer Amna the normal apologies of a man who'd behaved badly. Amna was kind enough to tell me she'd heard on the BBC shortwave African news that a party of Australian Aborigines had been to see Colonel Gaddafi seeking recognition for a sovereign Aboriginal state. I doubted that anyone from Fryer River was with them, but I expressed the normal level of interest in this news, and was grateful the item hadn't been there for her to tell the night before. Drunk, I might have said something like, “But they've got their own sovereignties,” and then, of course, I might have told her about Bernadette and Burraptiti.

I wonder what she would have made of such a love story. And the idea of daring hung over the night. That's how I could find Amna and arrest her attention. By a sort of daring. It didn't have to involve the bombing of prisoners or peasants—for sweet Christ's sake, no. Hadn't I held infusion bags and keened against trees in the groves of Jani? But it had to be something of that scale, something galvanizing. And I could not find what it was.

Quite early in the night then, I was thinking of going back to the hut which was now exclusively mine when Masihi sat beside me. He was wearing sandals and seemed to contemplate his dusty feet by campfire light.

“Our friend is gone!” he stated.

I said, “That's right.”

I could not tell if he knew anything.

“I did not like him,” said Masihi. “He had a dangerous bitterness. What was wrong with him, would you say?”

“It was his woman,” I said at once. “She's under house arrest in Addis.” I did not give him Tessfaha's version: that she was dead.

“That would explain it.” He looked directly at me. “Except … is there any such thing as house arrest in Addis?”

“I hope so. There's no doubt Henry loves her.”

He groaned. I wondered if he had a woman among the ranks of the EPLF. Were they, he and Christine, on the road so that he could get his daughter acclimatized before introducing her to some elegant Eritrean bureaucrat in battle dress? Christine's Eritrean stepmother!

I did not even get angry with Henry, except in dreams. I spent all of one fitful night reverting to the same dream. In those parts of the dream when I
knew
I was dreaming, I thought, this is good, I'll keep this anger when I wake up. But as soon as I did wake, I felt the accusations draining out of me. By the time I was fully alert, I'd be witlessly thinking,
Poor Henry!
Or else,
Great Henry
.

I remembered the appalled face he'd shown as we stood on the escarpment with our more or less ruly camels and looked down on the flame and blast below us, below Mohammed's granite mountain.

It did not seem that Tessfaha considered at any great length abandoning his program with the convoy. At his order, we were moved at midnight by truck to the vicinity of the old Italian railway, the one which filleted Italian Eritrea from Massawa on the Red Sea to Agordat in the west. The rail line was abandoned now—the EPLF had made it unusable to the Ethiopians.

It was here, as we dismounted, that I became aware that Tessfaha himself was not in our immediate party. “He has many concerns,” Moka told me reprovingly when I mentioned this. I watched Masihi, who seemed so calm about the circumstances and was checking his video gear and issuing instructions to his daughter.

We crossed the ruined line on foot. By moonlight, I saw that sections of track were bent awry and led off in erratic directions. I didn't know whether this was due to guerrilla energy or to heat and neglect. Amid the sleepers, small spiky suckers and cacti grew. We walked for the rest of the night on shifting, stony ground. It was so hard and so breathless that I was pleased to be able to straighten occasionally and see that Masihi and Christine were with me, to take comfort in rediscovering them. When Christine stumbled, she would say “Ai-ai-ai!” just like an Eritrean.

By now I expected to find Amna somewhere in the line, too, though I could not see her.

When Africa's enormously large and bright pole star came up over the rim of mountains, we reached a hillside on which sat two low goatherd's huts. Masihi and Christine and I were told to sleep in one. When I went down the hill to urinate, I kept an eye out, among all the settling and digging in of the rebels, for a glimpse of Moka and Amna. I felt certain she was with the party. And if she needed vitamin injections and physiotherapy to keep her ankles from swelling, how had this cruel hike treated her? Had she fallen out far back along the trail, where she would spend the day in hiding and join us at night?

Unless, of course, I had more or less collided in the dark with Amna, the state of her ankles couldn't be any of my business.

The Malmédy cinematic family and I slept deeply for an hour or two, until the heat of full day woke us. Masihi sat on his bench yawning and groaning and saying what a life this was and questioning his own sanity. His daughter smiled back at him. A mental patient in enviable control.

I stood up, swigged from my water bottle, and for a while stood at the door, looking out at the hillside. The EPLF were all under cover, sleeping in nests of acacia thorn. In the shade of a scrubby African conifer, however, Amna stood languidly cleaning her teeth with a sprig of olive. I wondered if Amna kept a typical obsolescent Western toothbrush in the Eritrean apartment in Frankfurt, or even there sought a supplier of olive twigs.

From Tessfaha before we left and Johanes before we slept, we had the strictest orders about showing ourselves by day, so even at the risk of waking some of the soldiers who lay strewn in their cloaks around the hillside, I stayed in the doorway and called, “Amna!”

I could think of nothing else to say to her, but I was frightened that the utterance of a mere name, without any prosaic message attached to it, would alert everyone, that they'd all be nudging each other, or whatever Eritreans do when they're joking about people like me. If I was to achieve daring though, I couldn't give a bugger about that!

“Mr. Darcy,” she called in her inflected manner. “Are you tired?”

I shook my head. She pointed downhill, and in a V among mountains I saw, palely sketched in haze, a road. She was as good as saying,
That's it. That's where it will happen
. Then she hooked two or three fingers loosely across her lips—this must have been her version of asking for silence. I inspected the road again through the layers of haze. When I turned back to say something to her, or at least to think about composing something to say to her, she had disappeared among the sparse foliage. She must have been living and sleeping and performing her rhythmic toilet rituals in some warren there which I couldn't see.

For the rest of our day, watching out from cover, I did not sight her.

Editor's Interjection: Fida in Asmara

We know now that, some thirty miles to the east of the encampment from which Darcy had his attention drawn to the old Italian road, another battalion of Eritrean commandos, the soldiers they called “Mobile Strike Forces,” were in operation on the afternoon and evening of that day. With the Eritrean Tessfaha and the Ethiopian Fida watching from a hillside nearby, they overran a purely military convoy made up of some twenty trucks belonging to the Ethiopian air force. These were bound from the Red Sea port of Massawa to Asmara airport in the mountains.

Fida later indicated to Stella Harries that a ten-minute skirmish raged, during which the convoy's armed escorts, confused, far from home and—as Darcy would have it—“lacking in grammar lessons,” fired in panic at the surrounding rebels and then surrendered to them. The marching of prisoners back through the lines would begin that very evening, the Eritreans again apparently proving themselves scrupulous in this matter of prisoners, even though, in a season of famine, the captives took
injera
which might better go to Eritrean peasants.

The convoy's papers had been captured intact along with its commanding officer. Fida, employing the aristocratic Amharic authority which was his second nature, interviewed the commander and then, that night, made use of the documents to lead Tessfaha and the trucks laden with rebels on through the three rings of security the Ethiopians had put around the military airport of Asmara. He would report that this was shamefully easy, for he was helped by the not unreasonable Ethiopian belief that no force would try to strike Asmara airport, especially given the security measures which had been taken. But of course, as Fida remarks, security measures could be a narcotic.

He remembers rolling—at the head of the line of trucks—past these three mounds, each of them defended by anti-tank and machine guns, behind which young Ethiopians talked, passed cigarettes, and listened to radio music.

Tessfaha had hoped that, again lulled by their new measure of security, the Ethiopians would have parked or hangared their squadrons of MIGs and Antonovs close together. He was delighted to find that it was so—four squadrons distributed around the northwest perimeter of the airfield, close to the officers' mess where Fida himself had lived for a time. So that no one could approach them by stealth, they were bathed in bright yellow light. Some of them were fueled and armed for their missions the next day.

Fida simply took up a position on the edge of the tarmac with Tessfaha—“directing traffic,” he would later call it. “There are the Antonov hangars, there is the fuel dump, there is the rocket store, down there, that bunker second on the left.”

It was all so quick, so stunningly loud and complete. Within five minutes more than forty MIGs were burning or had exploded on the airport apron. The fire and the column of smoke could be seen from Eritrean positions thirty miles away. Everyone moved automatically, Fida said, bludgeoned by the sound. He noticed some of the Eritreans fall and abstractly surmised that there must be firing from the officers' or soldiers' messes.

At a point when Fida had finished his traffic controlling and the further execution of the damage was in the hands of the rebels themselves, Fida led Tessfaha to the barracks, to the officers' quarters on the top floor. Their objective was the large bay at the end where the Russian military advisers stayed while in camp. Tessfaha and Fida were escorted and protected by a small body of young EPLF soldiers. These men and women fought a swift, terrible engagement with armed officers in the bar halfway along this landing. During it, Tessfaha pinned Fida to the outer wall, shielding him or perhaps stopping him from mediating. Fida trembled and protested as pilots he probably knew perished in there. But he understood no protest was feasible. He had—beforehand—believed that casualties would be on the Eritrean side and that the likely Ethiopian casualty would be himself.

Fida had looked forward to taking prisoner the squadron military advisers he had known—he had named them prosaically by their first names: a colonel named Oleg, a captain named Alexander, a lieutenant named Sergei. If one of them were out in the town, at least two of them should be in the base. But, after the shambles in the bar, Fida's Eritrean escort broke down one locked bedroom door and then another, finding both rooms empty. A third proved equally empty. It seemed sad to Fida, but not absolutely improbable, that all three officers should be in the city dining and drinking with the Soviet engineers of all stripes who lived in Eritrea.

To be thorough, the rebels broke down a fourth door. There was a shot from within which hit the wooden door jamb and bounced off it into Tessfaha's body. Fida presumed Tessfaha's injury was minor, a few wood splinters. In fact, the inventive Eritrean rebel would fall dead from the wound within seconds.

For his two large plans for that night he would posthumously attract frank criticism from his colleagues in the EPLF, for the fact that he went perhaps unnecessarily to Asmara himself, for the way the food convoy ambush involving Darcy and Masihi and the rest turned out. The random Russian shot from within that fourth room delivered him from having to explain himself.

Fida entered, passing Tessfaha as he staggered, and turned the light on. If the shot had come from an officer he knew, he could pacify and reassure the man. But the young man he saw standing by a bed was an absolute stranger, brown-haired, freckled, very thin. There was a bottle of vodka and a drained glass on a table in front of him, as if he had been having a nostalgic Slavic time, downing liquor in the dark. He had a Russian pistol in his hand.

Fida prepared himself to utter something soothing, but in the instant his mouth opened and before a word could emerge the young man sat on the bed and toppled sideways onto the pillow.

So that was it. The poor boy, believing too well the Dergue's stories about the rebels, about the way they tortured and dismembered prisoners, had taken his poison pill. With him perished, Fida can remember having thought irrationally among all the noise, an encyclopedic knowledge of the MIG-23 and all its ways.

By all accounts of this astoundingly effective strike, the Eritreans simply drove out of Asmara airport again, taking Tessfaha's body with them to save it from mutilation. Fida noticed that the guns at the third and second mounds had been silenced and the guard box was empty. Telephone lines had been cut and false messages had been broadcast throughout the city to police and army units.