To Asmara (19 page)

Eritrea was federated by vote of the UN with the Emperor's Ethiopia six or seven years after the end of the World War. There had been no referendum to get the approval of the Eritreans to this forced twining of the two nations, and in Asmara and even on the coast Eritrean intellectuals and agitators seemed aggrieved by the new federal arrangement. The young engineer Salim took it with traditional calm. With his wife and two young sons, he moved down the coast to the extreme southern zone of Eritrea, the province called Danakil, after the tribe who inhabited it. His new job was in the bay of Aseb, a rainless and scorching zone, the least rained-on port on earth. In the face of a glittering Red Sea, the great energetic sun was impotent to produce a rainfall of any meaning, a dew, a tentative shower. Yet the Emperor and the West had large plans for Aseb. Bunkering, oil refineries, berths, a bitumen road to feed into the highway from Addis to Asmara. The young engineer Salim became a town councilor, then mayor. He was president, too, of the Chamber of Commerce, which had grown out of the old Italian
Società di Navigazione Rubattino
.

He expected to have to swallow certain items of Ethiopian hubris. After the Emperor canceled the federation and simply took Eritrea over as a fiefdom, all public examinations were conducted in Amharic. But his sons were sufficiently clever to take that language to memory as well. Sometimes the Ethiopian garrison behaved savagely and on various pretexts—searches for weapons, Arabist agitators, or contraband—slaughtered encampments of the Afar tribes-people who shared the zone. Salim was driven to conclude that these slaughters were countenanced by the Emperor's government.

The Ethiopian forces in the hinterland of Aseb, in breathless and rainless Danakil, were largely Coptic Christians, like the highland Eritreans. The coastal Muslims therefore came to believe that the massacres along the dry wadis of Danakil were somehow inspired by their Eritrean brothers and sisters in the highlands. Killings and the burning of tents and villages were good policy, Salim could see. They stopped an Eritrean common cause from forming.

Salim Genete found himself a functionary of the Ethiopian government now, a civilian administrator likely to be appointed anywhere. Already the sons and daughters of old colleagues from Aseb and Massawa were slipping away northwestward over the massif to join this faction or that of Eritrean rebels. His own sons, however, were admitted to the University of Addis. There, he hoped, they avoided political groups, particularly Eritrean ones.

“As the Emperor got weaker,” Salim said, “he retreated in time. From being an imitation of a modern head of state, he began to take on the appearances and utter the edicts of another time, of the time of, say, Charlemagne. There were agents everywhere—in every city, in Aseb itself—and all of them straining to find the news which could feed the Emperor's failing ear, feed its appetite for hearing the worst. Did the empire fall? No, it performed the disappearing trick. Instead of breathing the air of
this
century, it tried to breathe the vanished air of some other. It choked in a vacuum.”

In the Emperor's last days, Salim was anxious because now he knew his sons had grown political and so—in police-ridden Addis—endangered. When the Emperor was deposed, however, and driven away from the New Palace in a Volkswagen, Salim rejoiced. Now his sons were safe. With other brilliant boys and girls they were laughing in the streets of the racy suburb of Mercato, laughing up at the hills where the Menelik Palace stood and where the Lion of Judah occupied a few rooms under the guard of the aggrieved officers who had now taken command.

Salim says with touching emphasis that he was ready to pretend to be a Marxist if that was what the new Ethiopian government, the Dergue, required; if that was the banner under which the people were fed, the children educated, the tongues of the Eritreans liberated, the nomads and villagers of Danakil left to their traditional devices.

Of course, both he and his sons were to be disappointed. For Mengistu, chairman of the Dergue, vested all the prestige of Ethiopia in the extinction not only of the Eritrean languages but, with them, of the Eritrean mouths.

It was suddenly more, not less, horrifying; more, not less, risky; more, not less, erratic a business to work as a civil administrator hand-in-hand with an uncontrolled military. Salim told, for example, of a friend and fellow member of the Aseb Chamber of Commerce, Doctor Berhai, owner of a Mercedes 380SE. Three members of the Aseb garrison coveted it. They had Berhai arrested for conspiracy and encouraged some of their NCOs to shoot him through the head in a poor Muslim cemetery inland. The Mercedes was backed into the belly of an Antonov transport for transfer to Addis. The transport, however, could not take off because of engine trouble, and while the air force waited for spare parts to be flown north, the back hatch of the plane stayed unabashedly open. Berhai's 380SE could be seen glimmering headlights first across the tarmac. Air force officers saw it; the military administrator of Aseb saw it; Salim, the mayor of Aseb, saw it when he passed the airport fence on official business or when he visited the terminal to greet an undersecretary of the Dergue's Department of Public Administration. No one protested or complained about Berhai's car, and at last it was flown to Addis.

The children of many of Salim's cousins had been arrested and proved hard for him to find in Ethiopia's chaotic prison system. And everywhere there were violations of equity, sanity, the principles of service, of honorable commerce. The hacked-off arms of young Eritrean agitators—agents, writers and printers of underground newspapers—were permitted to lie in the streets; it was no use talking to the military administrator or the police about that, no use invoking either humanity or aspects of hygiene. At the power plant the big transformers were shipped away to Addis; at the water works the pumping system was permitted to stay antique. Yet that was all that was required of Salim—the supply of water and electricity to the port town. The Ethiopians didn't want to talk to him about much else.

“I had to travel with the military governor everywhere he went. That was to protect the man. He had his offices next door to mine. A parable for the people to see: the civil and the military hand in hand. And camouflage and a shield for the military ruler, too! For the mayor was usually a man with friends and relatives among the Eritreans, even among the rebels. And rebels knew that bombs and volleys of fire intended for the general would also finish the mayor. Ai-ai-ai, what a situation this was!”

After protecting the military governor of Aseb in this way for some months, Salim was all at once transferred to the western city of Keren. This was a time when the Eritrean rebels, many of them children of his old business associates, were descending from the north with captured Kalashnikovs. Keren was threatened, and with it the road and the railway to Asmara. The Ethiopian military garrison, under a Brigadier Wossef, was in a confused, uninformed, reckless state of mind. Driving to his offices in the city, Salim could hear the large 122-millimeter cannon of both sides speaking out in the plains to the west and the mountains to the north. The Ethiopian conscripts were in a terrible panic: farm boys and goatherds from Harar, Gondar, Ethiopian Somalia who did not know what in God's name they were doing here, listening to shellfire in a threatened town.

Salim says Brigadier Wossef, their commander, was a joke-teller, but his humor had a frightened and savage edge which Salim didn't like. And so the journeys they undertook together and the official ceremonies within the sound of guns were tedious to Salim. The brigadier became depressed on discovering that the town was full of Eritrean rebel agents, most of them under twenty-five years of age. But because Salim's own sons were involved in the rebel movement, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front local cells took pains not to attack garrisons which he might perforce be visiting with the brigadier.

“For my life I was dependent on my sons,” Salim admitted with a shrug.

A summons to Asmara separated him from Brigadier Wossef. The Dergue wanted civilian authorities from throughout Eritrea to meet in the capital, to discuss the blowing-up of power stations and water reservoirs in the face of the rebel advance. Salim left for Asmara from the market square of Keren, outside the ditch and the double wall of razor wire behind which, in a two-story building, he and the brigadier had ruled the city.

The convoy Salim joined was long, and the drivers were tentative. As they entered the mountains, firing could be heard ahead and behind. All night the lead trucks came under hit-and-run attack, the wreckage needing to be pushed over the mountainside to make way for the vehicles behind. Among the civilian administrators gathered in Asmara, the word was that none of them would get back to their provincial seats, that the rebels were about to take everything.

Without Salim for cover, Brigadier Wossef was himself ambushed and shot dead while escaping Keren.

It was apparent now that all of Eritrea was about to fall to the rebels. They were in the foothills of the massif outside Massawa. They threatened the whole string of cities which lay along the old Italian railway line from Massawa to Agordat. The beaten Ethiopians, so the Eritrean administrators whispered to each other during their Asmara meetings, would now have to come to settlement with the Eritreans.

In fact, what happened then was that the Soviets decided, for the sake of control of the Babel Mandeb and of the Dhalak Islands out in the Red Sea, to intrude mightily and in terms which would be recorded on film by Masihi.

Eritrean rebels began to withdraw from their positions threatening the string of cities, the railway line, the central east-west road which filleted Eritrea. From his hotel in Asmara, Salim used a relative—perhaps, I surmised, even Amna, his Asmaran “niece”—to contact the secret Eritrean cells. For the first time in history one of his tribe had been forced to identify himself with the retreating cause. All the barbarities of the past five centuries had not caused one of his mercantile clan to do what he was now doing. “And they speak as if the twentieth century were the high point of the human soul!” he told me.

On the same night that the agents of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front took him out of Asmara disguised as a peasant and bearing false papers, his wife and two sons escaped Keren. It was the desolation of the northern mountains which now became the portion of this consummate townsman.

The townless maze of brown peaks.

Casualties and the Heart

Moka the stringy veteran brought the news up the stone steps of the terrace, two at a time, that Masihi had been definitely located. The cameraman was known to be on his way to Himbol, a dry riverbed half a night's drive south, where he intended to film a locust plague.

“It is hot and dusty,” Moka told us, “but there is a bush shower there. And then the daughter meets the father!”

“Merci bien
, Monsieur Moka,” Christine told him, and she closed her eyes and covered them with her hands, reminding me—strangely—of a woman whose son has been found. I had an impulse to go up and congratulate her, but her manner was very private and I decided against it.

“Merci bien,”
he repeated, hitting his skeletal chest with his fist, as if she'd told him a joke.

Henry, Lady Julia, Salim Genete, and I were all on the terrace drinking tea. The news of coming moves sobered us. Salim coughed. “Ai-ai-ai, if I could but travel with you … but there are certain questions of health.”

It was the first time he had mentioned anything to do with health. But it did explain why he didn't go afield searching for his son, the way Christine intended to hunt down her father the cameraman.

Any other travel purpose I had was now subsumed into getting the daughter to the father. I didn't think that could have been Tessfaha's idea. I wondered if I should take Moka aside, mention Tessfaha's name. I would have liked reassurance, the sense of traveling on rails.

Later I overheard Moka assuring Lady Julia that around Himbol she would find many peasant refugee women to speak to. It sounded as if Lady Julia had expressed the same doubts I felt.

After midnight in the guest house, in the room I shared with Henry, I was shaken awake by Salim, who was fully dressed in turban, white shirt, upper half of business suit, jellaba. A switched-on torch shone in his hand.

I forced myself painfully awake from dreams of the Eritreans' relentless bunker technology. The handsome dental surgeon and her picture album had figured in the dreams, as had Salim's guerrilla son. I thought that this was what Salim was waking me for, a celebration party for the arrival of the boy. So there'd be more of the bitter liquor called
sewa
to be drunk—except, of course, by Salim, who was saved from that duty by being an orthodox Muslim.

In fact, I could hear music outside and a sort of party in progress.

But Salim looked wan and not celebratory. “I wonder could you help me?” he asked. “I don't like to ask one of my fellow Eritreans, since they might make too much of it.”

He pushed into my hand a little vial of white tablets. “Would you come with me to the hospital? There has been a great battle. Wounded are arriving in front of the operating theaters. I have been told that one of them is my niece.”

“The girl?” I asked, thinking of the remarkable bureaucrat I'd seen being helped down the defile toward an injection of vitamins.

“No, not that one, not Amna Nurhussein. Another one. My dead sister's girl.” Salim seemed to emit a mist of grief which I thought I could very nearly see in the light of the torch.

“These tablets are for the girl?” I asked, still in a half-daze.

“Not for the girl. For me.” He had dropped his voice. “Kindly watch me, my friend. Should you see my face contorting, give me one of those. Angina is my grief, you see. If they knew that it was severe, as indeed it is, they would not have let me travel here.”