To Asmara (18 page)

Moka had no trouble leading the remaining three of us, the willing and the less willing, off again to another point in the hillside, where he waved us inside through a double screen of curtains. We took off our boots and stood in a long corridor inside the mountain. Peer Gynt, as Salim had promised. Five stretchers were ranged lengthwise along the wall. On four of them, EPLF male soldiers, naked, blankets over them, slept off anesthetics. On the fifth litter, a boy of perhaps six years lay. A surgical net covered his skull.

We squeezed against the wall as surgical teams in green gowns and masks came and went. Christine seemed very capable in this cavern air; Henry and I were the lost ones, Henry's face actually pricked with a kind of redness like embarrassment.

By way of double-glass windows, we could look from the corridor into three operating theaters. Through the window of Operating Room Two, Henry and I gazed together at gowned doctors and nurses and at a fresh-faced girl in army fatigues who sat on the operating table. A nurse unwound the gauze from the girl's ankle wound. As I gagged, I was aware that I heard no sound from Christine. She might well be a brave camera like her father, I thought. Or was she, through some accident of soul, shockproof? If her child had been aborted, had it somehow numbed her too?

In fact, though Henry and I made excuses to leave, Christine kept us there. I watched her inspecting the faces of each of the noisily breathing Eritrean boys on the stretchers. She reminded me of a nurse, trying to match each set of features with a chart.

Outside at last, Henry and I stood for a time, breathing, blinking back nausea.

By midnight, though, when we had visited every bunker, every ward, I felt invigorated. I found myself exercising a politeness toward Henry rather than sharing revulsion. Henry saw the girl with the frightful ankle and the child with the surgical stocking and all the rest as part of the familiar whole cloth of African pain, a continuum with everything he had seen in the Sudan and Ethiopia. I was disarmed by the cunning, by the competence, by all the crafts socketed away in these mountains of shale, in these secret and kindly caves which the MIGs and the Antonovs couldn't find.

By the time Henry and I entered the X-ray Department therefore, we were poles removed. Down the steps and between the painted plaster walls, yellow and brown this time like a hospital room from my own childhood, a technician introduced us to the Siemens X-ray machine, the Liberation Front's first, captured in battle in 1977 outside Asmara. Belgians had given a more modern and glittering device—it gleamed by its own screen and table in the farther depths of the X-ray bunker. It matched the immaculate quality of the room, but it lacked the aura of the older machine.

Divided in our response, Henry and I watched the radiographer's favorite plates: A femur fracture, the lump of shrapnel embedded in the bone. A bullet lying in the shattered radius of an arm. A bullet in somebody's colon. A machine gun round which had entered a neck, struck the spinal column, somersaulted to face puzzlingly back in the direction from which it came. “This man's spine is wonderful,” the technician told us cheerily. “He instructs in the training camp, and he runs like he wants.”

Always, free from extremes of emotion, Christine Malmédy was beside us, but again she wasn't engaged in the same argument as Henry and I. No expletives, no gurgles of revulsion or approval escaped her. It was as if all this served as education for her reunion.

And then the dental surgery: Henry and I, and the girl for a rudder. The surgeon an Eritrean graduate of Sofia in Bulgaria! A woman of perhaps forty years. I imagined her moving with equatorial composure among the Eastern snows, tormenting the young Bulgarian dentists with her Red Sea style.

She owned a photographic album of plastic sleeves, almost identical to the one in which my mother had once slotted photographs of my marriage to Bernadette. This woman's album, however, was packed with
befores
and
afters
of the most inglorious wounds, wounds of the kind which are somehow never advertised on the war memorials: the bearing away of the features, the shearing-off of the maxilla, the facial bones.

The
afters
were superb—humanity restored because human features had been restored. She was a palpably happy woman, this cosmetic dentist. There was no remaker of people in Beverly Hills—to name the supposed center for the surgical revision of humans—as happy as this woman. For if you could judge by her pictures, she had made the absolute difference. In Eritrea, the jaw wounds of the seventies had gone unreconstructed as she studied in Bulgaria. But now she was here, the defaced were restored. How terrible and astounding it would be to come from the battlefield, having lost your face, and have it given back to you carefully over months by this woman!

That wasn't the end of the wonders inside the caves. They accumulated further. After the maxillofacial, it was the pathology lab with its kerosene-refrigerated blood bank, its kerosene incubator, its bacteriological section! And then, like a final statement of rebel unrepentance, the three-sea-container bunker where, behind glass, water was sterilized in an autoclave and dextrose and salt solutions were prepared. Four hundred liters every night (someone boasted to us, the dazed visitors) more or less straight from the infusion room, the demineralizer, into the veins of the wounded and the ill, into the remaining tendons of the Afabet women.

I noticed that, as if she intended to return home one day, Christine souvenired one of the plastic bags marked in green lettering
MANUFACTURED BY THE PHARMACEUTICAL DEPARTMENT OF THE EPLF
.

She led us to a bay in a bunker where we met an antibiotic capsule machine from Bologna punching out its forty thousand capsules per shift. She soberly watched it extrude its particolored product, but Henry hung back and seemed defeated. He lingered at the door and did not want to know anything. He made pointed suggestions, again and again, about going back to the guest house.

We did not meet Lady Julia again until we were nearly back to our truck. I managed to fall behind the others with her. I wanted to hear her balanced answers.

“Impressive,” she said. I was disappointed at first. She'd used the adjective in a measured way, like a dowager visiting a private school for an art show. I wanted an enthusiast. Then, all at once, she became one. She stopped and considered me. “I don't wish to be quoted, Darcy. I'm under their influence, and I have to get away from the enchantment before I can speak reliably. That aside, let me say I get the impression that these people have taken flight! I mean,
flight
. They are jumping a gulf which no other race has jumped, Darcy. You get the impression therefore that these people are
it
! The link! A new level of moral being! Very disturbing, Mr. Darcy. Especially since outsiders, hearing a person speak like this, might think one had less than the full weight between the ears.”

“Not me,” I told her. “I think it's all absolutely bloody startling.”

“Oh yes,” she murmured.

Waiting by the truck, Henry gave me a particular kind of look. “Excitement's cheap, Darcy!” he warned me.

He paused and leaned against the trunk of one of the African pines growing in the valley bottom.

For the rest of the night I couldn't sleep or rid myself of a childlike exhilaration. To me the valley of Orotta
was
like a carnival park of the moralities. As Lady Julia had implied, there the greatest human fantasy, the fantasy of perfectability, displayed its glittering, supremely complex and supremely simple wheels. And dazed and giddied the spectator! Lady Julia and me, anyhow.

“It is not only the hospital,” announced Lady Julia Ashmore-Smith the next morning on the terrace.

Salim Genete, the middle-aged and turbanned Eritrean in the business jacket, was there. His son had again failed to arrive during the night.

Lady Julia had been in the small hours into the bunker in the valley where the exercise books were manufactured by a woolly-haired girl who had lost a leg on the Hallal Front. Now she held up an exercise-book cover Moka had given her, a memento to go with Christine's plastic infusion bag.

This was over breakfast—wheat and unleavened bread and sweet tea—on the terrace. She spoke low. She had already detected the bewilderment in Henry and could not utterly forgive it. I could see in the way she spoke the stubbornness with which she must have hunted down the mind of poor Sir Denis, her District Commissioner husband.

Henry, an edge to his voice, said, “So the Memsahib is pleased at all the Sambo cleverness?”

Lady Julia surprised me by not taking offense. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Yes, I suppose I must sound like an old-fashioned imperialist. But there you are! That's the world I was raised in.”

Henry hurled out the remnants of his tea onto the stones. The morning sun sucked it up almost instantly.

Salim stood up, craned his neck for a view across the valley, and sang, “Ah, my poor kinswoman.”

For a time I thought he meant Lady Julia. His mind had certainly been on her. He had watched Christine and the Englishwoman as they rinsed out their soiled shirts at the washing drum beneath the terrace. “Two generations of women talking together,” he had sighed. “Ai, a fine sight!”

But he wasn't speaking of Lady Julia now. We followed his eyes, which were fixed on a point down the defile. Three figures had emerged from the Department of Information bunker. Two tall men were supporting between them a hobbling figure in turban and shawl and jeans. I guessed they were making for the clinic. I recognized the figure in the middle as the woman called Amna, who had sat with us so tranquilly and without saying much at the coffee ceremony.

“Is she ill?” Lady Julia asked Salim.

Salim said, “Milady, oh yes. She gets swellings of the legs and joint pains. The Ethiopians treated her badly, you know. Afan, the Ethiopian police. She should be in Frankfurt with her physiotherapist, but she is very stubborn.”

I found it hard to identify the hobbling being I could now see with the Italianate elegance I'd admired the day before.

Salim told us, “Neroyo will give her injections of vitamins.
Ciao
, Amna!” He returned to his seat again. “She is in fact a kind of niece of mine, the daughter of my cousin the pharmacist from Asmara.”

The nonappearance of his son now seemed to leave him all the less composed at seeing his relative stumbling among the shale, being eased along in the daylight at an hour when, wide open to the bomb sights of the MIGs, the Eritreans did not normally go looking for vitamins.

Something About Salim

Salim's habits of mind were not those of the revolutionary. We could all tell that by his Empire loyalist interest in the correct mode of address for Lady Julia. He was instead a kind of Jefferson figure, a man who'd rather do business and be a Rotarian than join a liberation front.

He was frank in confessing all this to me. His ancestry derived from a particular coastal Cushitic tribe who had always done jovial business and tried to avert their eyes from history's great steamroller. His grandparents had spoken Saho and Arabic and some Italian, and dealt in shells, salt, bone meal. His father was a civil engineer engaged in the construction of piers and warehouses in the great port of Massawa. The family had lived offshore in a villa on the handsome island named Talud. Only the poorest of folk lived over the causeway in the mainland suburbs of Massawa, said Salim, beneath the hot brow of the coastal massif.

From these mountains above the port, however, snaked down a trade road as old as the kingdom of Axum and much appreciated by whoever ruled the Red Sea coast. Salim's family, said Salim himself, had a traditional skill for getting on with the manifold administrations which either came ashore with the tide or descended down the road from the massif. There was a tradition of offering accommodation, of finding your new niche, of adapting your ways adequately though not crucially.

“If you live like us on the Red Sea, right at its neck, the Babel Mandeb, the mouth of the bottle, then you've done business with everyone. You have sold and bought from the Coptic highlanders. You have sold salt and lentils to Christopher da Gama as he landed to help the Massawa garrison against the Imam of Harar, the grand Mohammed Ibrahim. You have certainly done business with the Turks, who held fast to Massawa until the Italians came. I suppose, if the truth be told, our lives were like those of Jews in Russia or Poland, or of Jews in the Yemen, for that matter. There weren't grounds for us to work up any national fervor, whether in favor of the occupiers or against them.”

His grandparents, for example, saw the Italians become interested in Massawa Island and the Gulf of Zula, then watched without regret as the Turks marched off. After four hundred years of doing business!

Salim was a child of eleven when he beheld the Red Sea Eritrean port of Massawa fill up with Italian naval vessels, with the sort of ferries whose bows come down and from which drive forth battalions of armored vehicles. From Massawa the Italians would invade in 1935 the empire of the Ethiopians, the kingdom of the Negus, the squat Chosen One, the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie.

Let me make an abstract of Salim's subsequent history, drawing both on his superior whimsy and my lesser brand. The Italians lost Eritrea and Ethiopia very quickly in 1941 to British forces operating from the Sudan. Salim's family was content enough, even though some of the highland intellectuals were agitating for independence. Salim's father, another kind of Eritrean altogether, became mayor of Massawa during the British occupation. The port in those days was host to countless British naval vessels, on all of which father and son had been welcomed to drinks parties. Salim and his father were both, according to the Prophet's command, abstainers—but politely and discreetly so, no fanatics. They knew that human beings from the larger world answered in their behavior a quite exotic and farfetched range of imperatives, desires, prohibitions, and commandments, and that it was gentlemanly to be cool about these things.