To Asmara (30 page)

I heard her voice break off into tears.

“Henry is right. I am an old imperialist dragon, and we old empire types want to make the great alterations ourselves. I'm sorry. I'm being very silly.”

There was more choking. I put my arm around her. What spare yet comfortable, round,
inhabited
shoulders they were.

“Perhaps I should just concentrate on visiting my grandchildren,” she murmured.

And then she had vanished. Back to Ferreweine, back to the large question, without allowing me to mutter any prosaic comfort at all.

I felt bereft and considered following her inside again. For some time I stood in Endilal's night looking at the hint of light through the clinic blackout. There were two sage women in there, conversing in Arabic, and I yearned to be back with them.

I knew that if Lady Julia were quick to publish the articles she meant to write about her Eritrean findings, they would steal some of my chances of freelance publication. It didn't seem very important here, with the sleep of the swollen-headed children rising all around me in the dark.

Nacfa

The loss of Julia and Christine seemed suddenly compensated for when Salim Genete's beautiful cousin Amna Nurhussein rose out of a hole in the ground outside Nacfa, under a waning moon.

This apparition took place by one of those EPLF filling stations. Seeing the truck appear in the half light, other people had risen as if from the earth along with Amna. It was the sort of crowd I was getting used to—soulful-looking Eritrean soldiers with shawls wrapped around their heads against the night chill; mechanics from the regional garages, traveling on business or visiting relatives; militiamen—like the ones on the plateau above Jani—in peasant clothes. Apart from her paramilitary drab, Amna was still wearing the striped Italianate shirt she'd worn when I first saw her, and it still looked freshly put on.

Moka had Tecleh stop. Between Amna and him there was the predictable shoulder-bumping, the normal greetings about wheat and health. Teeth—hers and Moka's—scrupulously cleaned with olive twigs, glittered in the dark. Her eyes flickered upward toward the cabin of the truck and saw Henry and me there.

“Good night,” she said to us in her sharp-edged, penetrating English.

Henry, nodding back, whispered to me, “Great-looking girl.”

“Has Salim's son arrived in Orotta yet?” I asked her.

“Not yet,” she said. I could hear the click of her tongue against those little stonelike syllables.

She'd confused my image of her by turning up here. Despite what I'd seen of her in Orotta, when she'd hitched a ride to the hospital, I hadn't expected her to stick round in this high barren land waiting in holes in the ground for the chance of transport. I crawled into the back of the truck, so that she could sit in the front beside Henry. He carried on a brief, practical conversation about the roads and the weather and the Jani bombing and how he hadn't expected to see her again so soon—all of this before the truck started up again.

She was on her way to visit friends in Nacfa, or so she said.

I watched her turbanned head jolting as we entered the bombed town, and my first sight of it was framed by the gap between the slope of her head and shoulder on one hand, and Henry's body on the other.

I wondered if Henry was thinking the same, embarrassing, paperback kind of thoughts I was:
Thrown together on a dangerous frontier
, etc., etc. Yet in view of Fryer River, I knew it was childish to give space to any feeling for a woman like Amna, whose life was so
essentially
removed from me, essentially beyond my imagining.

The city of Nacfa, holy in the Eritrean perception as Guernica, Coventry, Jerusalem might be in the perception of others, had in spite of all its wreckage the look of one of those places where, given a chance, civilization would pitch. It stood in a high bowl among the kind of mountains which seemed to guarantee a rainfall. Through it a good, clear mountain river ran. You crossed its stones as you came into town through a northern suburb of wrecked and formerly substantial villas, all quite roofless. Roofed, they were probably Italian in style. What a polished life Eritrean traders and officials of the Italian empire must once have lived here, in this town which marked a boundary between the Islamic plains of the Red Sea and the Coptic Christian highlands.

What was left of plaster on the ruined walls of all the town indicated that its color was once golden—golden schools, yellow offices, yellow rows of shops, a golden mosque whose minaret still stood (a symbol, of course, since it had survived the MIGs). In the late afternoon the minaret glowed with what you could fancifully call a golden assertiveness against the brown western hills.

Our bunker in Nacfa (since I always seem to start with whatever warren we occupy): It stood on the edge of a large garden pocked with bomb craters. Eritreans who lived in the ruins grew crops of tree seedlings, black pepper, cabbages, and tomatoes there, kept rabbits from Kenya and California, and raised chickens. Once, judging by remains of walls and ornamental gates, this had been the garden of an aristocrat, one of those Eritrean nobles with whom the Italians entered into a social contract for the control of their sweet Red Sea colony.

Before our door lay an exploded rocket of the type the Eritreans nicknamed “Stalin organs.” It had sown lumps of shrapnel round the hillside and the edge of the garden. Moka looked at the body of the rocket, the tassels of steel which grew from it, testimony of the force with which it had landed and done its apparently futile business. He picked it up and hurled it into the undergrowth.

Rats lived there. A leisurely convoy of three appeared atop the garden fence and made off to spend a day among the chickens and the vegetables. They moved like masters in Nacfa.

From the outside the bunker was simply a mound, and the door was deeply recessed in the mound and led by a narrow corridor into a sort of living room lined with clay platforms. The walls had been painted, a design meant to represent the drapes of a nomad tent, tent flaps hanging by rings from poles.

“Nice touch,” said Henry. “Poignant!”

Off this living area was a bedroom, bare-floored, where Henry and I were told to put our gear. Amna stood in the doorway, her small kit bag hung on her shoulder. She smiled evenly at us as we disposed our sleeping bags and air mattresses around the floor, Henry expressing his usual desire for privacy by setting his in the far corner.

The light in the living area came from outside, up the deep entrance corridor. But in the room Henry and I shared it entered through a hole in the roof, a shaft lined with planks and perhaps six or eight feet deep.

“You should have this room,” I suggested to Ms. Nurhussein with creaky gallantry.

“Not at all,” she said in that choppy, melodious voice, before vanishing. “You are the guests.”

Henry and I lay on our bedding experimentally and looked at the ceiling, which was canvas and lath suspended from the roof logs. Lizards and rats were busy in the air spaces between the logs.

There was often shelling in the late afternoons, when the dusk was ennobling the hills to violet. Shells fell outside the bunker with a concussion I could feel in my spine, but all that deep crafty work with soil and logs protected us. Moka, lying on a clay platform, would tell us in a sleepy voice exactly what was happening above our heads. “Seventy-six-millimeter,” Moka would say indolently, not bothering to open his eyes. “Stalin organ,” he might sigh. These racks of rockets, before firing and in their recumbent state,
did
resemble organ pipes. “One-hundred-and-twenty-two-millimeter,” he might say of the basso
crump
of the Ethiopians' biggest Russian-made cannon. The Ethiopians, he said, thought troops moved through the city at night, and the frontline tanks and artillery
were
all around us. The remnants of population, soldiers on leave, and bureaucrats like Amna could be found there, too, on the edges or passing through.

The fact that shelling usually began in the later afternoon was read by Moka as a sign of Ethiopian terror and disorientation. They wanted, he said, to make the night as loud with sound as the day had been with light. Moka would go on reading his novel throughout—it was a book by Han Suyin—and would occasionally ask me about this or that usage of English. A serious student. The Ethiopian artillery was merely a background to his classes in English idiom.

He might look up only to comment, to claim, for example, that in these circumstances of undifferentiated, panicky artillery duels, the rebels replied only with one battery of 76-millimeter, large enough to make a statement, small enough not to waste value. The lessons of the battle of the Somme and of Guadalcanal had not been lost, he would say.

It made my flesh creep the way Amna would arrive from her “friends' places” somewhere in Nacfa during these bombardments. It is too dramatic to say that the town was full of flying shrapnel, but the shrapnel
did
fly and high explosive made craters on the edges of the town. By the light of a kerosene lamp provided by the Department of Public Administration I would see her turbanned head bow to enter our bunker, and I would understand that she had been out among the explosions, which to her, as to most Eritreans, didn't seem to mean more than a hailstorm.

When Amna approached the bunker from the direction of the ruined town and the river, I would see the outline of her large turban and the flash of the oversized, stylishly tinted glasses which she tended to wear in most lights, even the dim light of sunset, as if she were a rock singer affecting a style. She would pass the Public Administration bunker, whose tenants she of course knew. Sometimes she would call to the woman and the child who were sheltering there in the doorway, in a space as narrow and as effective as a slit trench. That four-year-old seemed to take the bombardments with the greatest composure. She had grown up with them. To her they were the traffic of the earth.

After these pleasantries Amna would come on to our entrance-way, to our bunker with its mural of tent walls blowing in a gentle breeze—tent walls cleated as if to hold out dust, no matter who might try to raise it.

She always went into the little side room and poured water into a powdered-milk can with a red cow painted on it. This was actually an Australian brand of powdered milk, though I never mentioned the creaky connection to Amna.

Then she would come back to the mouth of the entranceway. Seen from inside she was pure silhouette. Seen from just outside the door she was lit by the storm lantern by which Moka sat, deep in the living area, reading his Han Suyin novel.

Then she would repeat that slow, beautiful, and efficient washing I'd seen outside the bunker in Orotta some weeks past. With that fall of liquid she seemed to rinse away the memory of grit from my mouth as well.

One afternoon when Moka and I were both reading by the light of the storm lantern, I looked up when she arrived and, as she washed herself, saw great nodes of scarring on the sole of one of her feet. This might be the scarring from that original injury Salim had spoken of, the one which still occasionally reduced her to a hobble and forced her to go to Doctor Neroyo for vitamins.

Tentatively, as she went on washing, I drew Henry's attention to her. I was reluctant to do so. But he
did
know Africa. Maybe he could explain the scar tissue.

“This is Africa, my friend. You know that. Jesus, there's thousands of things might scar an African girl. Between the creeds and the goddam tribes and the powers. What do you expect?”

Even by day the bombed and abandoned city had an invisible life. One of the bunkers along the bank of the stream by the garden, for example, was occupied by a husband and wife from the lantern-providing Eritrean Department of Public Administration. The bunker next to that belonged to the horticulturalist. He was a graduate of the University of San Diego. He ran a clandestine school, an agricultural college, on the hill behind our bunker, giving a husbandry and agriculture crash course for Eritrean farmers—some of them sixteen, some of them sixty, brought in from the north and east and west, some of them even smuggled through the lines. During our wait at Nacfa, we occasionally went and visited them in their unofficial, unroofed, shell-pocked polytechnic on the hill.

“Most of my Western friends are experts on grass for golf courses,” the horticulturalist told us. “There is enough work in Southern California alone for every one of them.” On his blind slope behind the front, he seemed indulgent about the Southern Californians playing their golf.

From these visits and conversations with people like the grass-grower, I found out that Amna was a pharmacist by training, that she had never studied in the West until now. These days she was doing, she said, an undergraduate course in history and politics at a university in Frankfurt.

“But I did not bring my texts with me,” she said.

Amna: Networking

Although Amna spent her days going from bunker to bunker, fact-finding, as she said—networking—she would come back across the stones of the river beyond the garden to dine with us. She did not want to make any inroads on her friends' limited rations, but she also liked the pasta the Public Administration woman in the next bunker cooked for us. Pasta was not usual Eritrean rations. It was considered a supreme delicacy, and the woman next door sowed canned mackerel in it to give it greater body still. The bowl came to us carried in the middle of a broad circle of
injera
on a tray.

I was amused by this frankly uttered taste of Amna's, especially since her appetite was so minute. Henry and Moka and Amna and I sat on ammunition boxes, winding up spools of pasta on our forks, sharing from the communal bowl. Of all of us, Moka was the heartiest eater. Amna ate mere strands of the spaghetti, single crumbs of mackerel, and very slowly.

Because the bowl was common, Moka and Amna prepared for the meal with copious washing. And after the washing, it was better for the spirit, even for the stomach, to have two rebel eaters share the pasta like this. Slowly the
injera
bread became patterned with strands of spaghetti. Inhibitions were lost.