To Asmara (31 page)

Sometimes when Amna turned up in the evenings, Henry and I were already at the door of the bunker, watching the flashes from the Ethiopian lines, feeling the impact in our feet and bones as, from nearby hills, the bombardment picked up drifts of parched topsoil. I suppose we now saw ourselves as veterans, unlikely to be driven underground by anything except intense attack. Earth was being blended with air; disks of shrapnel sought out the arms which planted the reforesting tree or the chives bush, though at this hour all the reforesting arms were deep below ground, tearing fragments of
injera
and scooping up the lentils which were too hot for Henry and me to eat.

Henry would grow feverishly angry as the sky flashed and the earth moved—a different sort of ire than he showed when confronted by rebel skillfulness. “To pay for
that
,” he said, pointing, “he makes the peasants grow navy beans. This is fucking coffee and navy beans and tomato paste converted into high explosive!”

I decided late one night, after Henry had gone to the other room, to spring the question on Moka. I interrupted his novel-reading.

“Do you know a man named Tessfaha?”

“There are lots of Tessfahas,” he wheezed, holding his book in a way that told me he meant to return to it as soon as he could manage.

I adopted a manner, including a sort of pensive clapping of my clenched fists and a sideways glance, which was meant to let him know he wouldn't get too much peace from me until he had answered properly.

“Are we waiting for Tessfaha? I mean, the man who spoke to me in London.”

“Tessfaha isn't coming here,” said Moka blankly and, I thought, without much sympathy for my confusion.

“Then what?” I asked, angry. “What will happen?”

“We'll go into the line when our escorts are ready.”

“Is Amna in our party?”

Moka suddenly reverted to his breathy, compassionate norm.

“I don't know. She moves on her own. She should not be here. Afan, the Dergue's secret police, treated her so badly. But Amna moves on her own. Her own boss.” He tapped the novel he was reading as if he'd gotten this last phrase from it.

“I want to be kept informed,” I said, but Moka nodded so genially that I was already, against my best instincts, halfway appeased.

Amna and Moka between them went on keeping us busy while we waited for a sign or an order from Colonel Tessfaha. By day, wearing our dun clothing, we would move over the hill behind the bunker to visit the gunners and the tank people. The front trench itself ran along a high ridge two miles ahead of us. Great sounds and enormous pillars of dust moved across these hills whenever the Ethiopians fired. I found it very fantastical to be traveling with a beautiful bureaucrat in a turban and a wheezy veteran, making social calls in such a landscape. Social they were. All the older soldiers, men and women, seemed to know Amna and Moka and exchanged fraternal shoulder bumps, the third bump, the one that had to do with wheat, slow and emphatic and like an embrace.

It was particularly Amna who attracted intense greetings. Old friends of hers emerged from holes and ran hallooing across earth widely covered with lumps of shrapnel, the scything metal we had heard landing during the past evenings. Across this ground, too, moved lines of young soldiers going to class in brush shelters scattered amid groves of cactus.

Amna's friends would show off their dug-in cannon to us, the Soviet markings, the calibrations and instruction plates in Cyrillic script. We met the 23-millimeter, which had two months past brought down a MIG-23; the 37-millimeter guns, which were murder to tanks; the 78-millimeters draped in their camouflage tarpaulins, their barrels in sleeves of canvas to keep the dust out. Amna never asked any questions. She stood back with a neutral face, neither smiling nor frowning. She always let Henry and I attend to all that.

Behind the batteries, remnants of
injera
bread sat desiccating on the rocks. They would be ground up to make
sewa
, the opaque, sour liquor Ferreweine and Lady Julia and I had drunk so plentifully in Endilal.

We would visit the tanks, too, backed into earth garages hacked into the slopes and covered with logs. When the tank crews saw us coming, they would immediately disappear inside the machines and emerge with their tank helmets on. They made us sit in the things, look through the gun sights, and pay attention to the place, repaired with epoxy resin, where the shell which had killed the Ethiopian crew of the tank during its service with the Dergue had entered the machine's steel apron.

Amna said little throughout all this. It was always Moka who urged us to consider the strange histories of those large beasts called T-55s. Made in the Urals, shipped to Africa, demonstrated to Ethiopian regulars by a Russian expert, captured at Mersa Teklai or Barentu with their heroes dead inside them or already fled, now ready to roll in Nacfa, to probe a flank in Sahel, to defend—if things turned bad—a retreat through this holy, razed city with its unbeaten yellow minaret. And the Russian manual, the key to all the tank's uses, captured intact inside it, translated into the tongue for these lanky boys in their strange helmets.

One afternoon a pensive Henry sketched a gun crew in action. A very good sketch with the distant ridge of trench line exactly rendered. No one seemed to object to this verisimilitude. Moka didn't choose to confiscate the thing. I believe Amna Nurhussein would have laughed at him if he had.

“Where is your wife, Mr. Timothy Darcy?” she asked one afternoon during a bombardment. She was obviously certain I had a wife.

No, she wasn't in England, I told Amna. She was somewhere in tropical Australia. For mysterious reasons I could not myself understand, I'd meant to pretend that the marriage was still alive. Or at least afflicted only with the sort of remoteness found in Eritrean marriages—the marriage, for example, of that superb little speaker who had kept Moka awake and me tormented in Jani.

But I understood that “tropical Australia” was a strange term to use—it gave too much away by its inexactness.

“My wife and I don't live together,” I admitted. I amazed myself by blushing. I had the residual vanity not to want her to believe that this was one of those average first-world separations, caused by the pedestrian griefs of suburban marriage. I found I took a shabby moral pride in the idea that my marriage had been singularly cursed. But I couldn't convey that. “My wife lives with someone else now,” I confessed.

Amna considered me studiously. It was an unworldly look. It reminded me of Christine. “So your wife left you?”

“Technically,” I said, sweating, “she left me. But in real terms, we left each other.”

“Isn't it strange that in famine and war there are few marriage problems … apart from death itself and the scattering of lovers over the map. Although some of the Muslim peasant girls who join our forces divorce their husbands first.”

I didn't know whether to be pleased or not that the chat had so quickly become analytical.

We had agreed to go to a village called Inkema, because there was a poet there, a woman called Mama Xenob. At dawn, when we reached the place ten miles behind the front, we found from people eating their breakfast
injera
and sipping their tea that Xenob had gone. She was visiting the Sudan, where her reputation for revolutionary verse had recently burgeoned.

We were welcome to look at the other wonder of Inkema, its two-hectare garden. “Jesus,” Henry told me. “We've seen enough fucking lentil plots in Nacfa!”

But, of course, we needed to be polite.

The gardener was a middle-aged man wearing a dirty smock and a wool cap. He had a quick whimsical smile. He pointed up to the contour of the hill, in which he'd dug some cunning little channels. From the air, he believed, they looked like mere chance drainage.

Henry refused to take up any of the slack when it came to asking the normal questions expected of a visitor. I asked the man the only one I could think of: whether he came from this place so close to the line to start with, or if he was a refugee.

I heard the expected answers: He was a member of a group displaced from a town called Embahara, three days' walk away. He told the by now usual stories of massacre and looting. Good ground, he said with typical nostalgia, better than this; granaries full of sorghum to which the enemy set the torch. He could never understand it, for they needed sorghum, too. The smoke rose for three days, and even as the gardener, a bullet in his hip, was carried away by EPLF soldiers who had turned up there after the Ethiopians left, he could see the smoke of burning grain stores.

So this place here, Inkema, was merely Embahara's shadow.

Then the gardener said something which struck me as less authentic than the rest of the tale. He said that the soldiers of the Dergue had had orders to force the people to learn and speak Amharic, the imperial language. People who refused to learn it, he said, had had their arms cut off.

When we'd left the garden and moved down into the village, I drew level with Amna Nurhussein.

“That story of people having their limbs lopped off?” I asked her. “Surely that's not the truth? I know the Ethiopians are tough. But cutting off people's extremities over a matter of language—that seems fanciful to me.”

The other three, including Henry, who was still walking with us, kept a silence. I got the impression I'd been guilty of some sort of gaffe. I listened to our feet clattering on the shards of mountainside.

In fact, it was Henry who surprised me by answering. “They do that,” he said. “It's in the tradition.”

I was taken by surprise at this new alignment between Moka and Henry. Moka, of course, gave a more expected answer. The Amharas felt outnumbered; even inside Ethiopia they were outnumbered by other races speaking other languages.

I waited for Amna to speak. For some reason I had an idea of her as a reliable witness, less partisan. Moka and Henry were in their ways as questionable as the gardener.

Amna said nothing, however.

At dusk, when the valleys filled with shadow, we headed back for Nacfa. It was a tranquil evening. From the back of the truck, I watched Venus rise. But as we arrived at our bunker, the largest shelling Henry and I had experienced began. Through it the woman from the Public Administration bunker brought our supper as usual. Afterward, in spite of the thunder above ground, Henry took calmly to his air mattress in the bunker's second room with his diary-journal. Moka wrapped himself in a sheet and lost himself in his novel, which soon fell from his hands. In his sleep he snuffled and wheezed like a man running a race.

I was surprised how remote we all felt from the shelling here, deep under our mound of earth. The barrage outside seemed very nearly nothing to do with us. Once or twice concussions close by seemed to jolt us sideways and bring a momentary blackness into our vision. But I was delighted to be here with the exquisite Amna, desultorily discussing German novelists, my shortwave radio on the table between us, and emerging from it, as part of a BBC shortwave transmission able to be heard only intermittently, a professor from Leeds discussing the desirability or otherwise of one-party systems for African nations.

Without warning Amna said, “You know the gardener?”

“The one I didn't exactly believe.”

“That one.” She gazed at me levelly. “It is true. I saw the arms of children on the street in Asmara. It happens. I would not invent such a thing, Darcy.”

She chose not to say any more. I was reminded of something Henry had mentioned once—that they don't relate their personal histories in any intimate way, that they don't put much stock in the subjective. But if I was to believe her, she would have to give me some such subjective tokens.

I think she understood this—the idea passed between us like a contract.

“I saw you being helped to the clinic in Orotta. Did that have anything to do with language?” I dreaded what I might hear. Perhaps the shelling, the enormous occasional thud outside, made me febrile. It was as if the present Amna remained in this cavern of ours on the strength of just one sinew, which even the memory of evil could snap.

“In some way,” she said dismissively and with that choppy enunciation.

“The bastinado?” I risked asking, naming one of the oldest tortures and one I knew was favored in the Horn. I was trembling, as if I'd uttered an obscenity. I was also frightened that Moka would wake and overhear. I watched the apparently perfect order of her features, the impeccability of the maxilla behind the flesh. Surely, I thought, surely none of this was touched.

“Oh,” she said, “it's well known that in prison I was luckier than most people.”

“Just the same, your Uncle Salim says that you were tortured.”

“I am here,” she said. “And I can walk. That means things aren't as bad as my father's cousin Salim might believe.”

She began cautiously, though, some of her sentences broken into by the strangely intimate, strangely remote row from ground level. She bore me gently along, speaking of family history. I was asked, for example, to imagine the family business, a large Asmara pharmacy, which had been founded by her grandfather in the days of the Italians. In the pattern of Asmara's worldliness and energetic commerce, her father, too, had gone on measuring out dosages in his dispensary through all the shifts and turmoils. As Amna described it, it was one of those Continental-style apothecary shops, owing more to the Italian influence than to the British. The medicines lay in enormous varnished cabinets bearing labels in Latin shorthand, and a librarian's ladder on runners put every cure and specific on the highest shelves within the reach of the pharmacist.

I found it easy to envisage those calm, varnished walls where Amna glided along attending to prescriptions, where between the sliding of the ladder in one direction or another, her father might hear of the arrest of the son or daughter of this or that client. The rebel organization in Asmara was called the Committee of Seven. Young nationalists of high school age distributed leaflets for it and wrote little insurgent columns in mimeographed tracts.