To Asmara (23 page)

“I hope you remember,” I told them, “I'll be writing for
The Times
. They'll be only too willing to hear about this sort of bullying.” Indeed they would. It would balance their picture.

Moka held his hand up as if asking me not to crowd in on him with threats of international chagrin and so on. He spoke briefly to the commandant and then brought the sketch pad back to Henry.

“You keep it, Moka, you little asshole,” Henry said in his tight, quiet voice.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Henry,” said Moka. But it was without any of that ceremoniousness that normally marked him. When Henry refused to move, Moka slotted the sketch pad in under the American's arm, where tension and perhaps sweat caused it to stick.

Then Moka turned to me. “Darcy,” he said familiarly, the old Moka again. “Major Fida is farther south now. Perhaps we will meet him. I cannot make promises about it. But cannot you see from this valley that we do not devour our prisoners?”

I was unhappy and disenchanted. I had perhaps the proprietary idea that
my
rebels had let me down. Outside, as we skirted the edge of the valley back toward the bunker of Askulu the politician, tripping on the sharp-edged, burning stones, Henry turned to me. He had on his face the same pained, stiff smile he'd worn inside, a smile like that of someone who has had cosmetic surgery and does not have the flesh left to grin broadly.

“Listen, Darcy, it isn't your affair. I can make my own statements to the sons-of-bitches. Understand?”

“I could understand better if I could also understand what in the bloody hell you're doing here. All I know is you break all the rules and you're still not enjoying yourself.”

“I expected to hang together on this trip and … behold … I've come unstuck. The unpredictability of the human beast, what?” He uttered the last sentence in parody of the Englishwoman. “I don't even have a proper job description. I leave the exactly defined projects to people like Lady Julia. God, what a fierce old tart!”

I said, “Do you like any of us at all?”

“I like you fine,” he said. “It's just that I don't think your little civil liberties act in there did anyone any good. I mean, these guys are playing for keeps. I respect them for that.”

“Then why bother breaking their rules?”

“Why not? I think they're fucking doomed. You know what I think? They're brave to the point of folly and they're clever to the point of being dumb. No one, absolutely no one, from Washington to Moscow, wants them to succeed. No one. If the Americans wanted them to, these hills would bristle with Stinger missiles. God's even taken the rains away from them, for Christ's sake. Even he thinks they're wrong-headed. The sin of pride, Darcy, the sin of being sharp when no one wants them to be. Their presumption, Darcy, that organization can save them.
That … that
won't easily be forgiven.”

I was surprised to find this outburst made me feel very partisan in spite of my recent disappointments, raised the temperature of the debate.

“The world doesn't want to lose this Red Sea coast to them, that's all,” I said. “But the world will bloody well have to.
They
won't give up.”

Henry sounded very calm. “After fifteen years here, I know what will be allowed to happen and what won't. This whole Eritrean operation smells of
what won't
.”

Moka had caught up with us by now. I didn't like the sound of his chest—things were pooling there which had no place. Henry and I walked on in silence and in mutual rancor.

The two of us didn't speak again until we got back to our hut. We lay on the clay benches. The sun breathed in the window and the joyous emerald lizards yipped and barked from the wall. Moka went down to a field kitchen dug in halfway down the slope. A young EPLF goatherd took his company's flock up the shaley hillside—I could see him from my bed, how comfortably he moved in his heavy military boots. I could hear Henry gasping for air as he lay on his inflatable mattress. I said idly that outside he'd mentioned “job description.” I said I hadn't known what he'd meant.

“Well,” he murmured, “
I
thought of it as a job description when they first talked to me. I mean, I thought it was serious business. Then I find we're sharing a truck with that French kid and with a goddam geriatric feminist! I think they could have given us a truck to ourselves.”

“Us?”

“Us. Maybe they think the girls will give us protective coloring.”

I considered this awhile. “You're saying that we're going somewhere together? Somewhere more than the normal traps they take aid workers and the occasional journalist to?”

He said, “Don't play dumb, Darcy. We're both going to the big convoy bonfire. You on behalf of what's loosely called
the press
, me on behalf of what's called—with maybe an equal lack of accuracy—the aid organizations!”

I stared at the thatched ceiling, so studiously made. I'd expected the plans for the ambush would have been made with equal study. I tried not to grimace or show any anger. For as a casual traveling companion, Henry had his charms. I have to admit that one of them was that the more he showed the strain in the way he himself talked and acted, the more he made the rest of us feel better and braver journeyers. Also, both Lady Julia and I were so solemnly
taken
with the Eritreans that without his irreverence and whimsy we would have become bores.

But now that I knew he was yoked with me on this mission, I felt more alarmed. Tessfaha should have told me. When I met Tessfaha I'd complain savagely, etc., etc. I spent some seconds making myself promises of that nature.

Henry said, in an imitation of my accent, “You sound abso-bloody-lutely delighted about it, cobber.”

I asked him who had invited him—I wondered if it was Tessfaha. But it was some of their aid people! Maybe Tessfaha had decided to let them into the plan, too, to achieve maximum coverage. Even so, I could not feel happy about this expedition, which had now been reconstituted in purpose and scope and more or less in front of my eyes.

“You may not believe it, Darcy,” Henry told me, “but I'm very popular in the Gezira. I behave myself and I run down the Ethiopian bastards with a passion you can cut with a knife. I would joyfully, Darcy, I swear
joyfully
, eat the bastards' livers.”

It didn't sound too promising.

“These aid people?” I asked. “Did they give you my name as well?”

“They mentioned there might be others. When I found out you were a journalist, I presumed from the start you were the other party to the excursion. I could tell Lady Julia wasn't. It wasn't what you'd call her primary area of interest!”

I took thought. I wanted to find an Eritrean official and harangue him. Across the hut, Henry fell asleep—I could tell by his breathing. In that solid heat, I was not so fortunate. The lizards on the wall yipped and caressed and celebrated their luminous green pigmentation. I felt solitary and neglected at the bottom of Africa's pit of isolation. Even in the worst of countries, in Poland say, I could attempt to call Stella or one of my London friends, even one of the Melbourne people, the old friends who thought that because of what happened with Bernadette I was something of a joke. Even in Mogadishu or Khartoum I could at least cheer myself up with the attempt to telephone companions in far places. Among the Eritreans, however, that glib therapy was not available.

Editor's Interjection: Recruiting Fida

We are forced to interrupt Darcy's account to explain Fida's absence from She'b. There is a need, too, to clarify the arrangement achieved between Colonel Tessfaha, the Eritrean intelligence officer, and Major Fida, prisoner of war and ejected MIG pilot, and to see how Fida became involved in a course parallel to the one Darcy committed himself to.

Tessfaha's approach to both men was a little out of character for the Eritreans. In their quarter of a century or more of war against the Ethiopians, these rebels had never begged much of foreign powers. At one stage they were believed to have approached the Americans and indicated that as a people subject to bombing they would appreciate Stinger ground-to-air missiles. But if so, the Americans didn't oblige. Nor would the EPLF have shown much surprise at America's rebuff. Perhaps they were not willing to give enough in return.

In any case, it was a rare occasion when the Eritreans asked outside people for help, apart, of course, from the obvious mercies of grain and cheese and powdered milk.

Colonel Tessfaha must therefore have won some argument among the Eritrean military leadership—an argument which took account of and paid reverence to the Eritrean dogma of nonalignment—and on the basis of that successful appeal, been enabled to approach both foreigners, Major Fida and the Western journalist Timothy Darcy.

On the afternoon of his recruitment, Major Paulos Fida—according to his own taped account to Stella—sat listening to the BBC African news in his bunker in the She'b officers' camp. On a packing-case table in the middle of the bunker sat his bunker mate's, Captain Berezhani's, shortwave radio. Berezhani had been captured together with the radio at the great slaughter of Mersa Teklai, which had left, within the space of little more than twenty-four hours, the bare Red Sea plains of the Sahel strewn with the corpses of four thousand Ethiopian tankmen.

Fida thought it very civilized of the Eritreans to let Berezhani keep his radio. For they themselves were so short of them. In the mountains they had a workshop where shortwave radios captured from Ethiopian soldiers were repaired and then distributed throughout the Eritrean population. They ran a similar workshop near the first one, where they repaired watches, alarm clocks, and the large Russian wall clocks which ordinary Ethiopian soldiers lugged to the front with them as if such an item, the edges of the face glass often frosted and etched with scenes from Russian winters, were essential for the peasant conscript going into battle.

In any case the Eritreans, whose officers did not wear any badges of rank themselves or seem to the outsider to assume any privileges, let Berezhani keep his shortwave and his alarm clock because he was a company commander. Both possessions were great supports to him and his fellow prisoner, Major Paulos Fida, who, having ejected from his plane, had brought no possessions with him into captivity.

Captain Berezhani listened to the daily African news in English with all the pent-up hope of a gambler waiting for an unlikely number to come up. He was almost daily disappointed in his yearning for news of Ethiopian change, for BBC speculation that the Ethiopian prisoners of the Eritreans might be repatriated. For there was rarely a mention.

Every day the two prisoners, the broadly built Fida and lanky Berezhani, huddled over the ammunition-box table and listened to the calm voice of BBC African news speaking of government clinics shot up by guerrillas in Mozambique, of Zaire's deplorable economy, of half-reliable rumors of some terminal illness afflicting Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. The stooping intentness of Captain Berezhani, his almost pleading demeanor toward the shortwave radio, were those of a man who had lost faith in military postures.

It was during such an afternoon broadcast some months ago, well before Darcy's disappearance and Stella's investigatory visit—well before, in fact, Tessfaha made his approach to Darcy in London—that the Eritrean intelligence officer called unexpectedly at She'b for Fida. Tessfaha, entering the bunker of the two Ethiopian officers, was already wearing a padded jacket to prepare for the evening chill but, as was again customary among the rebels, he wore no badge of rank. As both Fida and Darcy described him, he had a moustache, a slow smile, and an extremely polite manner. He shook the hands of both Fida and Berezhani that afternoon, for he had debriefed each of them after their capture.

For a while the three of them discussed the African news of the day, whether Gaddafi of Libya had gone pathological, for example, though of course Berezhani would have preferred to talk of things closer to his own concerns. They discussed the book Major Fida was reading, a volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs loaned to him by the political officer in She'b camp.

Tessfaha all at once told him to bring the book with him. “Where?” asked Fida. “You are going on a journey with me,” said Tessfaha. “Bring your cloak and your blanket and water thermos. We'll leave at one in the morning.”

“My friend Captain Berezhani also?” asked Major Fida.

“You alone,” said Tessfaha.

Suspecting that Tessfaha might have some novel purpose in mind, though he couldn't guess what, Fida reminded him that while the rebels were not bound by the Geneva Convention, they had chosen until now to observe it. It was wise policy and would give the Eritreans great moral standing on the day the Ethiopian prisoners were at last repatriated.

Tessfaha raised his hand in a wry, dismissive way. “Of course, of course,” he said.

The Eritrean then sat with the two of them during a radio reading of a novel by the English writer Melvyn Bragg. Eritrean soldiers all along the front line would be trying to listen on their unit shortwaves, to figure out the usages and grunt in triumph whenever they heard a word they already knew. An army berserkly devoted to learning foreign languages and mathematics! Perhaps, Fida thought, the Eritreans were winning because there was a lower level of boredom in their front trenches than in the Ethiopian ones.

After ten minutes Tessfaha looked at his watch, rose with apparent regret, nodded gracefully but without saying anything, not wanting to interrupt their enjoyment of the radio, and loped out of the bunker, allowing himself to lean a little against the dry stone wall of the entryway in what Fida took to be partially faked fatigue.

In the middle of the night, Colonel Tessfaha woke him in his mother language, Amharic, the tongue of Ethiopia's dominating tribe. Tessfaha's Toyota and its driver were waiting outside under a drench of moonlight.