To Asmara (7 page)

Whenever he used the word
fiancée
, the girl and I would find ourselves exchanging glances. She pitied him in her wide-eyed, stark, economical way, and I both pitied and envied him. He was still active in the question, after all; he was still working and angling away for the liberation of the Somali. Over the
karkedeh
juice and soda in the Sudan Club I was all at once conscious, in a superheated sort of way which cried out to be treated with strong liquor, that I was by contrast outside Bernadette's affairs, that the time when I could even have pretended to be taking part in them was gone even by the night she ran off in the center of Australia with the jailbird Burraptiti.

What is obvious—apart from the pity of it—when Henry uses the term
fiancée
, is that he wants the listener to know that his affair with the Somali woman is a matter of honor and not of mere convenience. During his period of exile from Ethiopia, Henry spent three months with relatives in New York, chivvying U.S. Immigration officials to let Petra into the United States and—more than that—demand that Mengistu issue her with an exit visa. He made the rounds of offices in New York and Washington.

“I said to them, ‘You fight to get goddam Refuseniks out of Russia. Well, Petra's a Refusenik.' When Mengistu sent in that '85 offensive against the Eritreans—you know, the one they call the Silent Offensive—I frankly hoped it would work, that the whole thing would be settled and Mengistu would smile and issue exit visas to everyone who wanted to leave. But the Eritreans held and Petra stayed home under house arrest.”

Henry himself went home to Sault Ste. Marie for Christmas after Mengistu had expelled him. Over the punch, he records, his uncle said to him, “Why didn't you tell that Mengistu to go fuck himself? He needs
you
, that monkey!”

“But the fact is,” Henry told us in the Sudan Club, “I needed my villages. I got these dreams of silt washing off the hillsides, clogging the dam walls, turning them to these shallow ridges. Nightmare stuff. Genuine nightmares! And my uncle—he was just like the rest of the public in the rich world. You couldn't speak to any of them. They couldn't understand what drives an aid worker any more than they could understand Himalayan monks. And you can't explain anything to them; the words in your mouth don't mean the same as the words in theirs.

“New Year's Eve, I drove to this park I knew from my high school days, right above the dirty waterway between Huron and Michigan. I drank a bottle of vodka and ended up in the hospital with hypothermia! See, I wasn't equipped any more to live in the West.”

Waiting on the Coast

The Eritrean-run villa in Port Sudan where Henry and the girl and I waited for our transportation south to Suakin and Eritrea stood in a broad alley by the Red Sea salt pans. It had its own high-walled garden of sand, a little echo of the Sahara. Scattered about this garden were piles of plastic bottles with the label of a West German brand of bottled water. Port Sudan's water supply was, according to Eritrean analysis, unfit to drink.

The house was run by wounded veterans of the Eritrean war. One by one they approached us during our first hours there and shook our hands with that solemn thoroughness characteristic of handshakes in the Sudan and Eritrea.

A young man who edged forward on crutches seemed to have nothing inside the legs of his pants except thin metal substitute limbs. He was nonetheless able to wring our hands. He sat with us at a small table in the hallway.

“You brought no wood?” he asked, winking at one of his fellow veterans. He was the villa wag.

Not knowing what was coming, we admitted we'd brought no wood.

“You should have brought wood. It costs like gold in Port Sudan.” He grinned at us. “I need wood. All the trees are gone from the Red Sea shore.”

I watched Christine greet this news with an old-fashioned, prim solemnity.

This young man, it turned out, designed prosthetic arms and legs out of steel and plastic and leather and wood in the yellow garage in the corner of the garden. And the wood was—as he said—expensive.

Both Henry and the girl seemed to be able to take this strange household as it came. But in a way I'd begun my time in Port Sudan badly. On the afternoon we'd arrived, we'd seen the “therapy cases” returning to the Eritrean clinic from their afternoon walk: emerging from the tracks and small hillocks around the salt pans, those square lakes of Red Sea brine stewing under the last of the sun; from the donkey and camel tracks; from the wastelands around the airport where nomads waited to do business in the city the next day. They came on in long lines, on crutches with crooked determination, in old-fashioned wheelchairs passed down to them from an earlier generation of American or European maimed. Last light from the Red Sea hills lit them. We'd all been awed to see them, but neither Christine nor Henry seemed to have been reduced to the same useless, mawkish fear and reverence which overcame me.

Both Christine and Henry were able to go off to the garage and watch the young amputee, the one who'd teased us about wood, fitting limbs to legless young men and women. I admired the way Henry and Christine talked there, asking the limb maker prosaic questions about resins and wood and padding. I was meant to be the questioner, the journalist, but I couldn't achieve a conversational tone. I lost my breath in the middle of sentences. At that stage I thought what a steady, functional companion Henry was going to be.

Through a gateway across the alley you could enter the much larger blue house which was the Eritrean clinic. It was a fancier institution than the clinic we would later see in Suakin.

Here, on a stairwell, when I was coming down from the roof, from a visit to a boy who had been cut off at the buttocks by an explosion and who, supported on his strong forearms, had been doing algebra in an exercise book, I saw a thin one-legged girl come to despair. Not yet fitted out with a substitute limb in the yellow garage, not yet familiar with her crutches, she let herself slump sideways in an angle of the stairs. She did not know I was above her, watching. Defeated, she let her shoulders slacken as she considered the blue wall. She wasn't substantial—she could have been a coat hung there—wishing, I suppose, that the mine or bullet which had taken her limb had also attended to her life. I could tell, as if from the angle of resignation of her dark, braided head seen from above, that she dreaded the rough, cheery rehabilitation her fellow rebels were offering.

My concern was not to be seen by her, and while I waited there Henry appeared through the same door the girl had. “What's the trouble, missy?” he asked, brushing by her, reviving her—it seemed to me—with the friction of his joviality. She began to move. I was stuck meanwhile, two flights up, at the far end of the axis of her misery.

Henry and I hung our rinsed shirts on the wire line in the garden, careful lest they fall on the sand and need a rewash. He looked at home in the withering light, mumbling his way through a series of jazz tunes.

He'd been just as solid and accepting a man as that when in Khartoum we'd fought our way aboard Air Sudan's eccentric flight to Port Sudan. The flight engineer had prepared for the takeoff by collecting all the nomads' crusader swords—they would be in his care until touchdown at Port Sudan. But the second officer wasn't able to get the forward hatch closed. A mêlée of Sudanese gathered, helping the pilots apply their shoulders, and Henry left his aisle seat and fraternally joined other passengers in trying to force the thing shut.

They fought with it for three quarters of an hour, and whenever his suggestions, compounded of snatches of Arabic plus some gestures, were discounted by the group, he would wink down the plane at us.

Throughout, I assured myself fairly impotently that in closing the hatch mere force wouldn't count for anything, and that if two Sudanese pilots, an old hand like Henry, and several senior Sudanese public servants were all not adequate to get the thing closed by cunning, then neither was I. Though I admired Henry's neighborly pushing and shouting, I believed that in another few minutes this flight would be canceled. There would be no spare parts. The Sudan's foreign exchange holdings, greater these days—under the bullying of the International Monetary Fund—were still not adequate to afford spares.

At last the door closed simply in any case, with one heave of many shoulders and then a deft turn of the handle by the pilot. The group of strugglers laughed together, the vindicated Henry among them. A practical man and a doer.

Within that villa where I developed my early admiration of Henry, we encountered besides the manager and the maker of limbs a sort of Eritrean elite—even though
élite
seemed to be a word forbidden among the rebels. We met men and women going to or returning from foreign missions. A pharmacist from the great Eritrean base camp of Orotta was waiting in the villa for a flight to Khartoum and thence to West Germany, where he would take delivery of a new demineralizing machine he needed for the manufacture of surgical drips. Also there that first night were two veterans, each of about forty years, one on his way to open a political lobbying office in Washington, the other the Eritrean representative in Bonn. They were lean intellectuals. They discussed Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith. The Emperor Haile Selassie had educated them, taken them grudgingly into his great university at Addis which, in their youths, like the Polish universities in the thirties with Jews, accepted only the smallest number of Eritreans, a
numerus clausus
of which they were members. They had postgraduate degrees from Cornell and Northwestern. They wore lightly the marks of another sort of education, the scar tissue of shrapnel wounds on their bare arms and neck and, in one case, forehead.

Sitting with Henry and the girl and me at a minute table in the fly- and mosquito-ridden front hallway, they ate with a sort of military voracity. The meals were pasta, canned Italian mackerel, and the excellent tomatoes of the Red Sea coast.

In view of the events which later seemed to turn Henry sour, it's worth saying that on either side of this hallway were two great dormitories where the men slept on whatever bed was free—the envoys, the rebel pharmacist, the maimed prosthetic-limb maker, the veteran who managed the house, Henry, and me. Fans churned, but even the Eritreans found it too hot to sleep beneath a mosquito net.

These beds at the guest house were considered luxurious by all old campaigners. The envoys lay on them, modest suitcases packed and ready to go beside them on the floor, and consumed copies of
Time, Der Spiegel
, tissuey editions of
The Guardian Weekly
. Wolfing the newsprint as they'd earlier wolfed the pasta.

Upstairs was the women's dormitory, which Christine Malmédy shared with Bufta, the cook. Christine had become fascinated by Bufta's hair, teased out along the scalp into lines and dressed with oil or—as Bufta would confess to the girl—rancid butter. I don't know why it didn't small bad. In fact, the few times I came near Bufta it smelled of robust maternity. The girl seemed fascinated by Bufta's face altogether, the slits at the side of her forehead where some sort of primitive medicine had been practiced on her in her childhood. Some of the double-degree envoys also wore such markings on their eyebrows or temples, but in Bufta's case the effect was compounded by a tattooed Coptic cross in the middle of her forehead.

“The cook is very beautiful,” Christine told me. It seemed that for the first time since she'd arrived in Africa, she was taking serious notice of the African visage, of Bufta's visage and that of the amputees and cripples. And none of the discomforts of that humid seaport seemed to give her any trouble. She didn't complain about the heat, the uncertain trickles in the shower room, or the fetor of the cloaca. Correctly and calmly, she guessed that there was worse to come. Obviously she was preparing herself for her meeting with her father.

Her only confession of discomfort was that she bought too much sweet Malinta cola from the street stall behind the clinic. It was a sort of addiction, this storing up of sugar, even though sugar was—if Stella could be believed—the one luxury the Eritreans made sure they had “in the field.”

I often went with Christine across the open dusty ground by the salt pans. My excuse was that in this area of town the police sometimes showed their suspicion of foreigners by seizing them for questioning. Rightly or wrongly, I thought I could talk them around, or at least give her some companionship in custody.

The street stall always closed in the early afternoon. Then, just as the prosthetic works in the garage was opening for its evening fittings, the stall would open again and she would set forth to visit it.

One afternoon when I was with her on this short journey, she pointed out an Eritrean boy and girl from the clinic. They were on their compulsory afternoon walk, he in his wheelchair and she on crutches, one of her pants legs empty, as if she had yet to be fitted up by the crippled veteran at the garage. She was not, however, the slumped insubstantial girl I'd earlier seen despairing on the stairs.

The two veterans had paused a moment by the salt pans and were talking, the girl leaning over the head of the young man.

Again, Christine did not seem to indulge any easy emotions about these cases. Under the awning of the stall, she bought four Malinta bottles from the Arab boy she always dealt with, left two with me, and took the other two across to the engrossed boy and girl. Half-embarrassedly they accepted the drinks, both of them offering her a solemn handshake.

When she came back I put her own drink into her hands. She applied herself reflectively to sucking the oversweet cola.

“They are very lucky,” she said.

“You don't envy them their wounds, do you?” I asked.

She said of course not.

And for the rest of the drink, belching softly on the carbonation, she discussed in what sense the two were fortunate. They were maimed, but she knew the maimed had great honor among the Eritreans. They felt their sacrifice meant something, whereas she knew from films that Vietnam veterans from America did not feel that way, felt their injuries as obscene accidents.