To Asmara (5 page)

I confessed I thought people were entitled to ask that sort of question.

“Especially,” agreed Tessfaha languidly, “since some of the trucks we load our own supplies on from Port Sudan actually carry the generous rock singer's slogan:
With Love from Worldbeat
. Especially since also we are grateful to him for the impartiality with which he gave help to us as well as to the Ethiopians. And so, the world asks,
What manner of ingrates are these Eritrean bandits?”

Tessfaha smiled subtly behind a double moustache of hair and beer froth.

“I suspect that you aren't ingrates,” I conceded. “So perhaps there has to be a reason which evades the understanding of both the singer and myself.”

Tessfaha took from the pocket of his sports jacket a brown paper envelope marked
Do Not Bend
. From it he slid out a color photograph. It was like some which Stella Harries herself had taken during her journey to Eritrea. In it three Eritrean rebels sat on stones. Two girls and a boy, none of them much more than, say, twenty years of age. One of the girls looked ironically, frankly at the camera. She wore khaki shirt and shorts. Her long legs were knees-up to the lens. And on her feet were the standard plastic sandals. Beside her sat a tall young boy, not as skeletal as Tessfaha. He, too, was barelegged, but his ankles were encased in old-fashioned military gaiters. The third rebel did not look at the camera at all. She was writing something in an exercise book. Her hair, like that of the other two, was exactly barbered. She wore long khaki pants bleached to paleness, and a crisp white shirt under her khaki jacket. A thorn bush cast a shadow over her.

The photograph thus expressed from left to right a gradation—from frank girlish interest in the lens through an equal degree of boyish curiosity in the middle to quiet young scholarship on the right.

A caption, typed on flimsy paper, was glued to the photograph. It said,
“Three young EPLF rebels, fifty meters from the Nacfa frontline trenches.”

Tessfaha pointed indolently to the figures in this photograph. “Those are the ones who so distressed the rock singer. And if not them, children like them, children younger than the war itself. Remember the Vietnam war? I was at Georgetown University when Saigon fell. The relief and the shame of that! Students held placards which said,
No More Babies Need Burn!
But these three I show you were babies then, and still in their way they burn. Do these two girls and this boy assault aid trucks, believing perhaps that it is better for the people to perish than to be fed by the enemy?”

A woman came to take our orders. Without answering the questions he'd posed, Tessfaha ordered heartily—salad, spinach lasagna, a new beer apiece. As if he had not just now been talking about food and the burning of food, he gave due weight to choosing from the menu, discussing ingredients with the English waitress.

At last, the order settled, he returned to me and to his argument. I was to remember, he said, what these children younger than the war had seen. In the towns and the pastoral villages where they had grown up, they had often watched convoys of aid pass, never stopping, ignoring a famished landscape, moving toward the great granaries of the army, of the oppressor. Walking pot-bellied behind their father's goats, they had seen the grain of America, Canada, Australia, benign New World grain, bypassing them always, traveling in the same string of trucks as the artillery shells. Food, after all, must not be put into the hands of the troublesome, of the seditious Eritreans and Tigreans. “Unless, of course, the presence of foreign observers and monitors of aid makes a certain sharing necessary.”

Such were the causes which had made these children rebels, which had, on top of other experiences, raids, confiscations, massacres, caused them to go to the mountains and join the rebels. For in the remotest villages, Tessfaha argued further, the children had observed worse perversions still than the ones he'd just detailed. They had seen Arab caravans moving from the south, across the starving grounds of Eritrea, into the Sudan. Camels loaded with grain and cheese and powdered milk, consigned to the markets of the Sudan by Ethiopian generals and officials on the make.

“And so now that they have arms in their hands,” Tessfaha murmured, gesturing with the hand which didn't hold his beer, “the children look from the ravines down onto the roads where the convoys move, and history, all they know of it, does not dispose them to accept the lines of trucks at their face value. For even if the vehicles carry the flag of the Red Cross, even if they say
With Love from Worldbeat
, these children believe the convoys move under military command, that they are driven by the military or else by conscripted drivers. And now one of our regional commanders, leading our young and maddened by the hypocrisy, has at last made an error of judgment and burned a string of trucks.”

He paused, and then, as if out of transcontinental solidarity, he turned his eyes and mine to older turpitudes still. “Did Stalin try to feed the Ukrainians? Did he wish to behold in his dreams a countryside of plump Ukrainians? Did he weep when he discovered that he and the generous Westerners had failed between them to keep life in some ten or fifteen million of his enemies? Or did he sleep better for seeing them vanish? Was, indeed, their going his purpose? Ai, the politics of food …”

The spinach lasagna arrived. My appetite had been blunted by the colonel's intense picture-making, but Tessfaha began working on the food functionally, quickly. I could see strands of spinach on the man's tongue as he continued to speak. Now the EPLF had offered to negotiate truces and safe conduct for convoys of
bona fide
aid, but the Ethiopian Dergue did not want safe conduct, wished to go on mixing the food and the armaments, wished to have the benefit of any Eritrean mistake in attacking those convoys which for once hauled nothing but food. From that occasional error a gracious benefit came to the regime. Namely, that the impeccable young rock star stood amid the desolation and was moved to tears.

“The rock singer,” said Tessfaha, chewing fiercely, “whom I love like a brother, does not weep for the complexity of the question. The rock singer stands near smoking vehicles and burning grain”—though my memory of the newsclip was that it was among hungry children that the rock singer stood—“and merely says,
Oh the blindness of the rebels!”

“You're telling me,” I asked, by now a little irked by Tessfaha's spate of rhetoric, “that the Ethiopians dress up their military convoys as convoys of aid? That they carry the insignia of the Red Cross, say, but are in fact convoys of armaments and supplies?”

Tessfaha agreed. That was exactly the accusation. I was engrossed by the way that, while he spoke, he still went on deftly and studiously cutting up sectors of spinach and cheese with his fork.

“This is a hefty sort of accusation,” I told him. “I can't see why the aid bodies who work with the Ethiopians would let it happen?”

Tessfaha nodded toward the photograph that still lay by the salad. “It's not extraordinary news if you come from Africa. Those three know it. Every soldier in their sector knows it. Every Ethiopian soldier in the opposing trench line knows it. Every Ethiopian in every garrison in Eritrea knows it. Every Somali and Oromo knows it. It is not so extraordinary, it is not startling. It is the daily traffic of the hunger zone.”

He cut up the last of his lasagna.

“There isn't much I can do,” I found myself saying. “I could talk to the editor about it, but I lack objective information. I don't think, with respect, that we could consider you objective information.”

Tessfaha smiled. “No, I am not objective,” he admitted pedantically. “I confess to being in some ways subjective, or at least to not being able to demonstrate my objectivity.”

Nonetheless I knew at once Tessfaha had something to suggest. We ate and drank a while longer, though. The something did not emerge.

And then, when we were down to the lees of our second beer, it presented itself. If I were there at an attack on a convoy! If I could report
that
! Would
The Times
perhaps fly me as far as Port Sudan, after which the Eritreans would look after me? As well as they looked after Stella Harries, Tessfaha promised, smiling. In a cashless society, since south of Port Sudan cash did not operate!

I did my best to seem calm and qualified and dubious, but in fact I felt a great giddiness. I'd had little to drink, but nonetheless I took ecstatically to the idea of a rehabilitative journey. I found at moments of promise like this one that I thought about rehabilitation in terms of impressing my wife. I knew that she was no longer interested in any penance I might do, but I couldn't convince myself of it.

As well, there seemed to be all at once a strange acrid smell above the table—the dusty smell you got in the streets of Khartoum in the minutes before the
khamsin
struck. I realized then that it was the odor of my own fear and excitation. And to be frank, the stench of simple ambition as well. Not just the primitive hope of arresting Bernadette's attention, but straightforward ambition: to be
there
, at the point where the crucial things happen, the things which—when adequately witnessed—change the opinion of the world.

“I'll have to think about it,” I told him. Knowing I'd already thought of everything.

Mark Henry

The Eritreans at their office in the city had warned me that our—Christine's and my—date of departure for Port Sudan coincided with the third anniversary of Numeiri's overthrow. Flights out of the city's mud brick barracks of an airport to Port Sudan might be canceled without explanation. The army might, for purposes of their own, seize the few aircraft of Air Sudan.

Indeed, Christine and I found the blue wooden doors, beyond which tickets to Port Sudan were to be issued, locked and barred. I already had my ticket and at least therefore a notional seat on the Air Sudan flight, whenever it left. I'd been prepared to have to compete for a ticket for Christine. I'd not expected these bolted doors, though. I might have once vapored on about the kinship of Africa and Australia, but I found I had a pretty European taste for exact timetables.

The barring of the domestic airport could mean anything, but no one in front of the doors seemed to have been flustered into voicing loud speculations about it. Passengers conversed in polite and discreet Arabic. Public servants and businessmen stood around in their exquisite white jellabas. Family men urged their masked wives into the shade of the terminal's side wall, since the temperature was far over forty degrees centigrade. Nuba, even Zande tribes-people from the south, carrying tribal slashes on their cheeks and crusader swords in their belts, kept their counsel, their faces shadowed beneath swirls of dazzling white linen. But no one wandered around asking whether southern rebels had brought down another Boeing with a Stinger ground-to-air, or whether the military had commandeered the domestic aircraft as an early move in a coup. People here knew how dangerous idle opining could be.

Amid the Muslim women shone the face of an exquisite girl whom I guessed to be Shilluk or Nuer—I'm not informed enough to tell infallibly the difference between tribes—swathed in diaphanous green cloth. A starched headpiece gave an elevation, a nunlike peak, to the fabric across her forehead. The cloth framed a face which was sensual in an ancient way, a face at once innocent and concupiscent. Like most of the men, she carried a highly polished attaché case with tumbler locks. Air Sudan—nicknamed Sudden Death Air by Western journalists—were notorious for being overbooked even when they did fly. In the battle to board the aircraft, the attaché case with its metaled corners might become a weapon.

Waiting by the wall, too, was a certain blond American I'd seen in the dining room at the Akropole. He lolled against a wall, his head back against the retained night coolness. One of his hips was leaning against a massive duffel bag, and he was riffling through a diary and journal stuffed with photographs, loose pages, grimy business cards. He wore the washed-out browns and duns of an old African cat and had that unfussed look of a frequent flyer on erratic airlines.

An official opened a judas window in the door and called out some genial information in Arabic. My Arabic is of the phrasebook variety, but I heard the recurrence of the phrase
b-it-tayyara
, plane. The American seemed to get more of the speech than I did, however. He raised his head, took stock of the crowd, and so caught my eye. It was pretty much that point in a bemusing wait where Europeans in an alien crowd begin to be drawn together anyhow. A primal gathering of skin unto skin.

The man hitched his enormous duffel bag and strolled toward us.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a midwestern drawl, “if my Arabic serves me right, there are certainly no planes flying. Tickets may be even more speculative.”

Christine Malmédy groaned and shook her head.

The American told us the rumor at the Akropole was that the government might relax the
Sharia'h
, the Islamic law, today, as a gesture toward the southern Sudanese. “In which case,” said the man, “we can all roll round to the old Sudan Club and get tanked, a prospect which doesn't dismay me in the slightest.” He squinted as if from the first sting of Scotch on the palate.

Ahead of us, the doors now swung wide. A wedge of people, led by the Nuer-Shilluk woman, surged over the doorstep and into the dimness inside. “I think this is where we do it, ladies and gentlemen,” the American told us. “
Inshallah
. God willing.”

In the scrum indoors, he would occasionally stroll up and down chatting in Arabic to one nomad or another, or to a portly businessman. Gradually I began to see that his Arabic wasn't much better than my own, but he flourished it with greater confidence. The words which emerged most commonly from the American's discussions with the other Sudanese passengers always included
Malesh
—too bad!—and
Inshallah
—if God wills it.