To Asmara (15 page)

“Inshallah,”
murmured Moka, the toothy veteran, and laughed sweetly amongst his white teeth.

Something About Fida

In our room inside, I took out my pack and reread a letter I'd gotten a few months back. It was written in faultless English by a man named Major Paulos Fida, an Ethiopian prisoner of war in the hands of the Eritreans. Stella Harries had befriended him here in Eritrea during her visit and been very impressed by him. Later, at her suggestion, I'd written to him and sent him a few books. He'd felt proudly bound to submit in return a written, mannerly essay, which I now held in my hands.

Prisoner of War Camp

She'b

4th February, 1988

My dear Mr. Timothy Darcy
,

Thank you for the gift of books you sent me from England. I was particularly fascinated by the copy of the Koran you sent, since I had never acquainted myself with that document before. My mind is attracted by the echoes of the Christian Bible one finds in the Koran. The treatment of the Virgin Mary, for example
.

It is not so much that I believe that Mohammed borrowed from the New Testament. I think he took from the same basic set of myths and fables, the same store from which the New Testament itself grows. For if he had borrowed from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the story would be closer to the ones they told. What in fact one finds is the pattern and the strength of the myth, which is a higher thing than mere detail
.

The fact that Major Fida needed to be introduced to the Koran by an itinerant journalist like me was, according to Stella Harries, an index of the hauteur of the Amhara, among whom Fida had—at least until the day the Eritreans had shattered his plane in the sky—counted himself a proud member. Given that the Coptic Christian Amhara looked east to Red Sea Islam, west to desert Islam, and considered themselves encircled, I wondered why he didn't bother earlier to inquire into the faith of his Mohammedan co-nationals.

Major Fida continued:

The American novels confused me, though it is just as well that I read them. I can see why in my youth at the Harar Academy we were restricted to Mark Twain's
Tom Sawyer.
I had in more recent years read Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter.
There is the same spirit in the Updike, the Styron, and the Bellow books you sent me. I believe it is called a “sense of sin.” Despite how lecherous the books might be, everyone is as cruelly punished in them as in Hawthorne
.

I found a strange, joyless obsession with some sexual acts
—
distracting reading, I might tell you, for a prisoner of war
.

But a fixation with sin is no different from a fixation with virtue. Sex and purity are equally likely to consume the mind wholly
.

I have to confess that I do not like the idea of the world run by the sort of people who write these books. However, as you know, I don't desire a world run by the alternative either
.

The novels were instructive, though. I seem to hear reverberations of them in American foreign policy, at least as that is interpreted to me by the BBC shortwave news
.

Someone let slip that you may be coming to Eritrea. I remember my conversations with Miss Stella Harries, and I would be delighted to have one with you, so could you please ask your guide to put a visit to my camp on your schedule
.

Did you hear about what the Chadians did to the Libyans in Wadi Dhum? They captured an entire army corps from Gaddafi. Of course they had logistical help. The Eritreans did the same thing to us a few years back, but it was not reported on the BBC World Service. This most enormous victory since El Alamein did, however, receive some coverage, I believe, on Voice of America. I, of course, heard nothing of it, since I was still flying then for my country
.

I returned to that sentence. “Someone let slip that you might be coming to Eritrea …” I wondered how an Ethiopian major, a prisoner of the Eritreans, knew that.

There is a rumor again that the Red Cross might succeed in repatriating us all, might indeed be negotiating secretly with my leader, the same one who denies our existence here in Eritrea, denies that we have been captured, denies that our captors spared us, denies that our wounds were treated, denies even that we were brave. I suppose that if the International Committee of the Red Cross did take us home, the Dergue would be too ashamed to massacre us, though we could never expect to have a future in the armed forces. Perhaps I could work as a teacher. In prison I have become more of a scholar
.

In the meantime, here the air is full of the flap of locusts' wings, and the fear of poor rainfall possesses everyone
.

Yours sincerely
,

Paulos Fida, Major
,

Ethiopian Air Force
.

I was carrying in my pack a letter for Major Fida, given to me by Stella. It was apparently from Fida's wife in Ethiopia and had reached Stella indirectly, by way of West Germany. It was pretty crass of me, but I found myself daydreaming now and then about the impact of the letter on him.

Stella had visited Eritrea in the season in which the Eritreans had swung their right flank around the provincial city of Barentu, captured it by dawn one morning, held it for fifty days, and replenished their armory from the large depots lying around the city. Brave Stella was one of the three Europeans to visit Barentu during the time the Eritreans held it, before the Ethiopian air force inevitably drove them out of town with bombing raids.

It was on the same journey that she had met and talked with Major Fida at the prisoner of war camp in the valley of She'b after dark one night. Stella later played me the tapes of the interview. Later still, of course, these tapes were edited up and played on Radio 4 in Britain.

She had asked the major whether he had ever used napalm on any of his bombing missions. She said that at the question there had been a flicker behind the major's broad, handsome eyes, a flicker which said either,
I'm telling the truth but this woman won't believe me
, or else,
I am not telling the truth and she knows it
.

The interview went thus:

FIDA:
I did not carry napalm on any of my missions. Of course, I was new to the Eritrean front, I had previously been down in the Ogaden.

HARRIES:
Did the Air Force use napalm against the rebellious Somalis in the Ogaden?

FIDA:
My squadron did not use napalm against the Somalis. I had heard rumors of other squadrons …

HARRIES:
During your time flying on this front, the Eritrean front, were you aware that you were doing much damage to the Eritreans?

FIDA:
No. We felt we were hitting nothing but mountain caps and stones. And we wanted to hit more than that. Certainly we knew we were fighting for an imperfect regime. But twenty million Russians perished for an imperfect regime during World War II, and like them we thought we were fighting for the integrity of Ethiopia, for an idea, for the nation's mysterious wholeness. And within that frame of thought, a fighter bomber pilot brings a lifetime of training with him into the cockpit. A MIG-23 pilot has wonderful technology at hand. The West likes to think of Soviet technology as flawed, imperfect, what you call Mickey Mouse. We, who are supplied by the Soviets, and the Eritreans who have armed themselves by plundering our supplies—we both know that Soviet technology is a capable enough affair.

Now, to have all the resources of a MIG-23 at one's command, and to be at war, and to feel that all that force and energy is not being applied—well, it dispirits the pilot. It was a common complaint in our squadron—you heard it daily from all the pilots. Our squadron's Soviet military adviser was always buying such pilots consolation Melotti beers in the officers' club. So sharp was this frustration that my fellow pilots confessed that if they saw a flash of green or blue or golden cloth below, they dived at it and strafed by impulse.

Though not entirely by impulse, of course. We had been told that all the Eritreans were a legitimate target, since all the Eritreans were in revolt and needed convincing. The normal propositions, you see, which are so easy to believe.

Stella's Instamatic photograph of Major Fida showed a broad, brown face, limpid brown eyes, the whites tainted to yellow by bile salts released by recent episodes of malaria.

“After capture,” said Major Fida on the tapes, “once I had had a chance to look around, I was astonished at how much damage we had in fact done.”

On one of the tapes in Stella's possession, Major Fida talked with a professional self-absorption about his last mission. He had been engaged with a colleague, someone he called a “wingman,” to bomb a segment of the foothills of the northeast Sahel, the desert littoral of the sub-Sahara which, since the great tank battle at Mersa Teklai, the Eritreans have securely held. He had been told to bomb Eritrean military bunkers on the edge of a barely inhabited Sahel village. Anti-aircraft, heavy in some areas, was here considered to be light.

The cockpit computer brought Fida exactly to the area. He dropped out of a sky of African purple and came down over the mountains at a height of a few thousand feet. Dropping further, he
could
see bunkers neatly slotted into the mountain side. There were windows inset in them, their sills plastered and painted the cerulean blue the Eritreans liked to use in their interiors. On the flanks of the hills, a flash of yellow, then a grayer and browner movement caught his eyes, as if the stones themselves were taking flight before his awful descent. This was the first time in his flying career that he had sighted the rebels.

By his own confession, he was eager to do them damage. The mistrust of Eritrea, he told Stella Harries, had been taken in with his mother's milk. Compared with Eritrea, the Ogaden was altogether a simpler business. It did not derange the mind the way the very word
Eritrea
deranges the mind of Amhara, the mind of Ethiopia.

At the sight of the cerulean blue windowsills and the movement on the slopes, he released two general purpose bombs. He was not expecting any riposte from the ground, so he was thinking of climbing a little and going back for a look.

He
had
heard that, far on the other side of Eritrea, the Eritrean Peoples' Liberation Front had captured the city of Barentu and held it for a time—captured, too, its four batteries of 23-millimeter cannons, suitable for anti-aircraft defense. It had not been suspected that any of these might have been rushed down here, to the far flank on the Red Sea shore.

But the sky until then so pleasantly vacant all around him was now tarnished with sudden little blue-white clouds. A second after he noticed them, one of his gauges showed a loss of engine power and a falling off in hydraulic pressure. Over his shoulder he saw a banner of flame beneath his wing, and then oil began flooding around his boots. With the one surge of flame he lost two thousand feet. He could hear his wingman screaming to him now over the radio. He pulled his ejection lever. He did it with the unarguable certainty that the Eritreans would torture and execute him when he landed. He didn't like that all his military skills and his laboriously put together mastery of English were about to vanish, sucked up into the sky. On the way out, his left arm caught the canopy and shattered on both sides of the elbow. Vaulting and then falling through a narrow instant of time, he lost all his consciousness.

Under blankets and beneath roof logs in a bunker, he awoke without any of the pain which had been with him when he ejected. The plaster on the walls was painted blue, as was the windowsill, and he presumed in his delirium that this was the very place at which he had aimed his bombs. A large-breasted Eritrean woman in battle fatigues, seated on a grenade box, watched him with maternal amusement. He did not lower himself to ask any questions about their intentions.

As in a blue dusk they carried him down to a wadi where an ambulance was waiting, he said in Amharic, “Why don't you show your hand? When do I see the bastinado and the water torture?”

There was only one person among the Eritrean soldiers and stretcher bearers accompanying him who understood Amharic. To most of them it was the language of the oppressor. Yet the Amharic speaker in this case was a very black young man, probably from Barka province in the west, which bordered on the Sudan and—in a land of great nomadic activity—was virtually Nubian. He also had, this Amharic speaker, three diagonal scars on each cheek—a tribal person therefore, and one wondered why he had ever bothered to learn the imperial tongue.

“Don't be anxious on the score of torture, sir,” he smiled darkly. “We do not want to satisfy your arrogance. We'll subject you to something worse than that. We will treat you as if you were a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention. We will insult you with compassion.”

Stella Harries had interviewed the major only a month or two after his capture, and he seemed already pleased that the Eritreans had not satisfied his worst dreams of torture and assassination. There were by now other matters oppressing his mind. He had discovered that his government had renounced him, had denied that he existed.

The Ethiopian conscripts and regulars held by what Addis Ababa called “the bandits” had not died in torture, but were instead held in vast prisoner-of-war camps stretched along valleys, loosely guarded by small squads of Eritrean boys and girls who wore—according to a phrase of Stella's—“the discreet air of victors.”

These prisoners had been excited at various stages by visits from Red Cross officials. Negotiations for their release were under way. Fiercely held hopes rose and fell in the p.o.w. camps of Eritrea. But in the end the Ethiopian tyrant Mengistu, a soldier himself, who should have understood how captives felt (or so Fida told Stella), had ordered the Red Cross to stop dealing with the rebels, to stop talking about Ethiopian prisoners under pain of being thrown out of Ethiopia itself.