To Asmara (6 page)

He took special care of Christine. He knew how to work an African airport scrimmage, how to make openings into which he deftly and unselfishly inserted the French girl. Soon we all had tickets and confirmed seats for a plane which was rumored to be leaving the next day. We did not bother to tell the girl that if there was trouble it was unlikely to leave for two weeks.

Happily, I'd asked Stella's Eritrean assistant Ibrahim to wait with the truck. I offered the American a lift into town. He accepted and climbed into the cabin. He reached across the front seat to shake my hand. There were four of us crammed there when he closed the door against his ribs. “My name's Mark Henry,” he told me. “I'm with Southern Unitarian Aid, but I'm not a southerner and I'm not a Unitarian. I've been marking time down in a refugee camp at Wadi Belidayah. Lots of southern Sudanese down there. Great people, sad cases.”

I introduced Ibrahim, the girl, myself to the American and returned to something he'd said.

“Marking time?”

Henry shrugged as well as he could in the room he had. “We were thrown out of Ethiopia. I mean, I was, Southern Unitarian Aid was. Punished for complaining, for stating the obvious. That God doesn't make famines, governments do. But as you know, Ethiopia is the focus, the glamour post for the aid people. They all want to be there. That's where they have the really big-time famines. They've got lots of prestige invested in staying there. Well, friend, no longer. We've been cast out!”

He shook his head. I'd noticed this sense of exile in other Westerners who'd been expelled from Ethiopia.

We sweated shoulder to shoulder for a while, talking about the Gezira refugee camps. I didn't mention that the girl and I were going to Eritrea. Because of my contacts with the Eritrean “colonel” Tessfaha in London, it seemed best to keep that a private matter. But then the American said, “So I got an invitation to travel elsewhere. Eritrea.”

“Invitation?” I asked.

“From the Eritreans, the aid people here in Khartoum. I thought I'd go and see the other side of the equation. That's what they say of Eritrea. It's the other side of the whole business. You can't know Ethiopia until you've seen Eritrea. Just like you can't know the U.S. until you've seen Mexico.”

I asked him if he was going to Eritrea
right now
, as soon as he could get a Port Sudan plane.

“Exactly right,” said Henry. “And so are you and Miss Malmédy here. The Greeks at the hotel told me.”

The arrangements I was now stuck with—delayed flights, the girl, the American—had even more thoroughly punctured any of those fantasies about a secret trust which my recent interview with Tessfaha might have raised in me.

The girl said, with her normal fixity, “I'm going to see my father in Eritrea. He is the filmmaker in that country. His name is Masihi.”

Henry whistled.

“He who expects the Messiah,”
said Henry. “That's what it is in Arabic. Does your father expect the Messiah, missie?”

He laughed without any malice, and the girl shrugged and said, “My mother says he is an atheist and a kind of Marxist. But she thinks all rebels are Marxists. His real name isn't Masihi. It's Roland.”

With the name of Roland hanging over us—the name of that virginal French knight and trumpeter, who burst a cerebral valve while blowing a warning of the coming of the Muslims in the vale of Roncesvalles—we entered upon a small incident, an adventure which—to use a cant term from the social sciences—
bonded
us as fellow pilgrims. As Ibrahim turned the truck into El Kabir Avenue, we found ourselves facing a broad wave of Sudanese, tightly packed from the walls on one side of the street right across to the sanded-up paving on the other side.

“Islamic Brotherhood,” said Henry. “Dead on cue.”

The crowd facing us included devout women as well, apparently chanting and wailing behind their veils. Banners as wide as the avenue carried a legend I'd become familiar with, under the tuition of Stella, during my earlier visit to the Sudan. “Islam is our religion, Allah is our ideology, the
Sharia'h
is our politics!”

The marchers, it seemed, were on their way to the Nile banks to dissuade the President from repealing “the law.” They wanted to keep their nation safe from halter-necks and drunkards.

The truck seemed to back not so much because of Ibrahim's engaging reverse and expending a little quantity of fuel, but on the gusts of energy from all these fundamentalist folk. In any case we found a quiet laneway, and from there made our way into town by narrower streets. There, at institutions such as the Golden Elephant Panel Beating Company or the Nile Crocodile Electric Repairs Company, less frantic Sudanese had ignored the holiday and got a morning's work done.

We seemed to understand that the three of us were fellow travelers now and would not easily escape each other's company.

Something About Henry

The day the girl and I first met Mark Henry in Khartoum, at the desert fort/airport, Islamic law was not lifted. Nor had the military by dusk taken over the city. In what felt like a normal evening, Henry asked the two of us to dinner at the Sudan Club, a European meeting place which—thanks to the lobbying of the Islamic Brotherhood—was still dry.

The club stood in what must have been once the best garden in town. It had been laid out, and the bar, mess, and residence built, in the early twentieth century, in the years after Kitchener's triumph across the river at Omdurman, that bare stretch of hilly ground which Christine Malmédy had shown no interest in visiting.

Now that the people who built it and the purpose they built it for had both vanished, the club seemed a strange irrelevance. There was a villa on the grounds where British officers and their memsahibs once stayed while in transit. I imagined them resting on the verandahs while their peach-skinned children, now old age pensioners in a new Britain, went hiding and seeking among the date palms.

In the bar and dining room, officers must have found a continuation of the luxuries of Indian messes. These days, though, the bar where such finicky gentlemen once drank real liquor was full of skin-and-bone aid workers attenuated by malaria, hepatitis, by the so-called “mystery viruses” which rise up out of the Nile, or else by a taste for
khat
and hashish, which somehow suppress the appetite.

Having come through the day intact, the
Sharia'h
was preserved at the bar that night by a turbanned and jacketed barman who had no intention of learning how to pour cocktails. Over a meal of the Sudanese specialty called twisted fish, accompanied by
karkedeh
juice and soda water, Henry began to talk a little about his history.

He told us he came from near the Canadian-American border, from the industrial city of Sault Ste. Marie. This coal and steel town sits astride a neck of the Great Lakes, some of its bitter suburbs in Canada, the other half in the United States. As he described it, geographically and in terms of culture, it was its own state. His parents died when he was ten, and he was raised by an uncle for whom he felt some affection. But he disliked the shameful squalor of his home city. He liked what he called “the honest squalor of other parts.”

“I studied agriculture at a cow college in northern Michigan,” he said.

“Cow college?” asked Christine.

“Sorry, missie,” said Henry. “Agriculture.”

He had an agricultural ranginess, was tall to the point of stooping, with a thatch of hair which had once been golden but had now turned a fairly flaccid nicotine. And he was an old cat in more than African terms—he told us he'd worked for the Peace Corps and for Southern Unitarian Aid in Sumatra, India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and now Sudan. His specialties included soil conservation, deep water holes, small community dams. “I have in my time seen the light enter thousands of faces as the water flowed, friends!”

He had been put in charge of his organization's Khartoum office just recently. “But it's a tough business. Listen, you just can't get medicine or grain or water drills into the parts that need them most. Into the Southern Sudan, I mean, into Darfur and Kordofan, let alone into the Bahr Al-Ghazal or Equatoria. It's the civil war. Last month, for example, some rebels handcuffed two of our drivers to the steering wheels of their trucks and then incinerated the trucks! How's that for a death!”

The French girl blinked. Then she asked with her usual suddenness, “Are you married?”

Henry paused in a way which made me suspect inexactly that he had a wife somewhere. “I have a fiancée,” he told us. “She's a Somali and her name is Petra. She's under house arrest in Addis. I'm still negotiating her visa.”

I seemed to remember Stella mentioning a particular American who went around lobbying people, wanting pressure put on the Dergue to give his girlfriend a pardon and an exit visa. I wondered had Stella been talking about this man, Henry? I hoped not, because I believe she said also, “Everyone knows the woman's probably dead.”

“I'm bad at languages,” he confessed a little irrelevantly. “I let Petra do most of the talking for me, even though I know a little Amharic. I get by on gestures and bullshit. My only talent, though, is sketching.”

And he took a few minutes to do us a passable sketch of the waiter.

Mellowed by the twisted fish, he returned to Petra's story later in the meal. “I knew her for nine years,” he said, “and I thought I could look forward to knowing her forever. That is, till the big expulsion.”

I wondered why he hadn't married her and given her the protection of his passport. But there could have been trouble with her family, who probably didn't approve of the liaison.

In any case, in the year he was thrown out, the good rains of July and August had ended a famine in Showa province. It was a point of history at which Henry could congratulate himself that his small wells and dams had saved some hundreds of lives, if not thousands, and might make the future return of cyclical famine less likely in at least a few villages. And then, with little warning, the Ethiopian government, the Dergue, its premier the army officer Haile Mariam Mengistu, successor since 1975 of the Emperor Haile Selassie and displaying the same autocratic habits, expelled SUA from Ethiopia.

“He chose us to make an example,” Henry forlornly told us in the Sudan Club. “He was gearing up for this eighth great offensive against the Eritreans. He told governments and aid bodies not to give any food or other materials of any kind to the Eritreans. Most of us continued to. And some of the SUA officials, guys more senior than me and more full of opinions, said this and that about his shitty policies. That landed SUA and me on Mengistu's list of hostile bodies. And the boys at the Ministry of the Interior in Addis didn't like me having a Somali girl. So I was on the hit roster in any case. Mengistu threw us out with his real enemies, the French crowd
Médecins sans Frontières
. That's who he really wanted to get.” He stared into the lees of purple juice in his glass. “But all this goddam expelling didn't extend to Petra. She stayed! Oh yes, she stayed.”

The girl leaned forward. “How old is she?”

Henry waved a hand. He took out a wadded diary, extracted a photograph from it, and waved it in front of us. It showed a woman as tall and thin as the people of Somalia generally are. “Graduate of the University of Addis Ababa,” said Henry. “No cow college for her, a real seat of learning where it was hard for Somalis to get admission.”

Her father, the American told us, was a surgeon from the Somali city of Mogadishu, and she had worked with the Red Cross in that region called the Ogaden, the great plain in the southeast of Ethiopia which the Somalis consider their own but which was—by decree of the UN—part of Ethiopia. Somalis still persist in calling the Ogaden “Western Somalia,” but—Henry said—Petra avoided even in private such emotional and dangerous terms as that. She was very careful in case anyone mistook her for a Somali rebel. “The Amhara are a great tribe, friends, but you wouldn't believe how antsy they can be about the others, about the Oromo, the Somalis down in the Ogaden, the Tigreans in the north. Above all, of course, of the Eritreans. If you're Somali, you don't have to go around using terms like
Western Somalia
to get into trouble. On some days they were likely to arrest you just on the basis of your face and your background!”

I don't think Henry meant to give us Petra's full history. He was drawn out by the girl's dogged questions: “How old is she?” “What is her family?” etc., etc.

I wondered if my story and Bernadette's ran as close to the surface of the skin as Henry's did, whether it could be so easily started running?

Petra was already working in the Addis office of SUA when Henry first arrived there. “But it was
Fetasha
that made us friends,” said Henry.

I'd heard of the period known as the
Fetasha
, the Search. When the Emperor had first been overthrown by the Dergue, there had been excitement among the robust minorities in the capital: the Somalis, even the small group of Eritreans who were students at the university, and all the others. But Mengistu and the Dergue had by the time of
Fetasha
disabused them of all hopes. The regime armed gangs of unemployed youths with leftover American weapons from the Emperor's day and sent them into the streets as vigilantes to keep order, to demand orthodox revolutionary behavior, to take vengeance on those who showed a flicker of fear—fear being misread as false politics.

Anyhow, Henry used to escort Petra home to her small walled house behind St. George's Cathedral through the impromptu roadblocks of the
Fetasha
. He would at one time, he said, stay there for more than a week, keeping guard over her in her tiny rooms.

I imagined them holding to each other behind shuttered windows, listening to the armed and feckless children scurrying by in sandals, M-16s in their hands. The shouts, the threats of the armed children, and the screams and whimpers of frightened adults were sometimes less than half a block away.