To Asmara (9 page)

We were employed in the end by the tribal council at Fryer River, three hundred miles west of Alice Springs, close to the continent's geographic center of isolation. The tribespeople were members of two large tribal groups: the Pitjantjara and the Pintubi people. The Pintubi were among the last on the continent to have had contact with outsiders. These two sets of related people lived on an immensity of esthetically pleasing but very barren country. They knew how to
read
it, though, and had come to terms with it millennia past. This traditional earth of theirs, so remote from cities, had been granted to them, freehold title, by the federal government only a few years before Bernadette and I were posted there.

Bernadette hoped to be particularly useful to the women, who—she knew—had different secrets and mysteries than the men. The women were believed to be the most powerful influence behind the tribal council, even though none of them were members.

The Yang and Darcy parents faced another shock therefore when they saw their expensively educated children board a jet plane bound for the tribal milieu.

From the start, I loved the Fryer River country. It took me by surprise. The balance of enthusiasm for my new task and this new locale shifted almost at once away from Bernadette to me. It was here that my old half-serious bar talk about the sisterhood of Africa and Australia seemed to take on visible form. For, whether you knew it or not, you
did
see Kenya there; you saw the Sudan, you saw the mountains of Ethiopia—or of Eritrea for that matter. Here was a fruitful desert where wild honey dripped from the fronds of the grevillea. Desert oaks, said to grow an inch in a century yet three times as tall as a human, populated the plains. And arcing away from the settlement, to the north and the south, were two great ranges of apparently sterile mountains, brazen at noon, purple at other times, home nonetheless to a million flowerings of desert botany, as also to antique clans of euro, kangaroo, wallaby, and dingo.

Fryer River itself, one of the earth's most ancient watercourses, also mimicked Africa by being a ghost of a river. It ran only in rain time, perhaps once in three years or even once in ten. From its warm bed she-oaks and eucalyptus trees grew, drawing on a secret river deep beneath the geographic one.

On the empty banks, Bernadette and I lived in a trailer partitioned into bedroom at one end and kitchen–living room at the other. Friends from Melbourne slept in that living room during visits. Air conditioning came from the settlement's diesel generator. But the Pitjantjara and Pintubi did not always want the government's light or artificial breezes. Few of the Pintubi had a taste for air conditioning. Bernadette and I both saw that the people were more concerned with the night cold than the blaze of noon. There seemed to be a connection between the cold nights and the ceaseless activity of spirits, who, during the hours of sleep, might steal the crucial coating of fat from around the kidneys of a man or a woman.

I believe I'd never done better work or had more of it to do than in Fryer River. I was so zealous; I had encountered a fresh way of looking at the earth. The tribal council brought me to the view that houses in the European sense were not always a mercy, for the Pintubi in particular but even for the often more “worldly” Pitjantjara. These people were attached to the earth in a literal sense. There were stories of Pintubi who, when arrested and imprisoned on floors of cement or planking, died in the night of pining for the mother-breast of earth. Housing seemed to the Pintubi a ridiculous closet into which to crowd a human soul.

The other large claim on my attention in Fryer River was the strange desert addiction to petrol sniffing. Pintubis and Pitjantjara, nomads in their hearts, looked upon everything as equally a product of nature. I liked to expatiate on this fact to visitors. In European societies, I'd say, the disposable—tissues, pens, packaging—declares itself. The collection and hoarding of the merely disposable is always looked upon as an illness, and collectors of garbage and wrappings and newspapers have been certified and locked away for seeing permanent value in the throwaway.

The desert nomad, however, takes the aberrant view that everything is equally disposable, that everything has a limited and a merely vegetable life—except the spirit itself, which is eternal and which endlessly returns!

The end products of this nomadic view were in fact littered all over the desert. Tribespeople who went to Alice Springs would spend too much of their mineral royalty money on secondhand automobiles—bombs, lemons, clankers. When these cars gave out on the way back to Fryer River, in the dry river beds or the red foothills, the Pitjantjara and Pintubi driver didn't feel orphaned by a failure of technology, as a European traveler would. Sometimes he would push the vehicle onto its side to see if any obvious fault declared itself from beneath. But if nothing could be done with the thing, he walked away from it without too much regret. For its cycle was finished.

The desert west of Ayers Rock was littered with vehicles which—in the dry atmosphere—never decayed.

And an unhappy conjunction existed between the vehicles and the Fryer River children. These boys would have been, in a traditional and untouched tribal setup, going through the lessons, making the long journeys to particular sites, training in ritual enactments; would have been desert seminarians. But the old men looked upon them as rendered partially unfit through white education and rock 'n' roll.

Because of their unworthiness, their initiations were delayed. They treated the painful gap by siphoning petrol from the desert wrecks and inhaling it for a high. During my stay at Fryer River, Freddy Numati, a man of about forty-five years who headed the tribal council and was a trained mechanic, one day led me to a tree under which lay a dead fourteen-year-old Pitjantjara boy, his face jammed into a peach tin half full of petrol.

The elders had no tribal precedent for dealing with this strange addiction. They looked to me because they knew my spirit was more akin to petrol than theirs. They looked to the police, too, who came through on patrols. The council were more willing than I would have liked to use the police as a means of ejecting some petrol-obsessed youth from the Fryer River settlement to the reform school outside Alice Springs. For there clinical psychologists and social workers, their souls also more akin to petroleum products, could deal with him. To the council, this petrol-sniffing disease had arrived at Fryer River like an unscannable virus from another planet.

The idea that one should thrash a child for its addiction, or kick it in the arse, again had no history among the desert people. In fact, the tradition was the opposite, and for every blow you landed on a child the members of his clan had to strike you back.

Unequipped, I found myself speaking to the sniffers, negotiating between the police and the tribal elders.

In a normal suburb of tormented people, Bernadette would have been superb and compassionate. But it was against the tribal order for the elders to ask Bernadette Yang to counsel young men. I didn't particularly resent this. I believed that Bernadette was busy enough with the women.

The women had begun painting in acrylics, using the designs which had for thousands of years been employed for painting in ochres on sand. The Pitjantjara and Pintubi symbols adapted to this method were circular patterns for the waterhole spirit places and dots signifying the plenteous spirits themselves. These paintings were maps to the core of Australia, but they were esthetically pleasing as well, and a good one could sell for $10,000 in the United States or Europe.

Bernadette was learning to use this painting technique, though she did not understand the patterns as a tribal person would. As far as I knew at this stage, she had found among the women the same perfect place I enjoyed among the tribal council.

But, according to what visitors told me afterward, Bernadette Yang was already unhappy. She had begun to complain of the desert women, of how they avoided her eyes and fell silent as she approached. I barely noticed it though. Like Masihi, I was besotted with a people I could not belong to; I was engrossed in their scheme. When that happens, it's too easy for a certain type of human to sacrifice the usual attachments of blood, of what you'd call—even though our trailer didn't have one—the hearth.

I didn't notice. I would need it explained and ultimately demonstrated to me. Henry had had the
Fetasha
to alert him to the threat to his Somali. I needed something of that weight and obviousness to grab my attention. I wouldn't be getting it.

Trucking the Paraplegic

In the shimmering wreckage of Suakin, a town which had been left to decay after the Turks departed this coast and yet looked as if it had been bombarded, the vehicle which would take us down the Red Sea coast and into the Eritrean mountains arrived. It halted among the rubble in the laneway outside the Eritrean barracks and clinic where we had been waiting. It was small and, in theory, faster than the big Mercedes trucks. Sand bogs would reduce that advantage though.
Deutsche Arbeiter Bund
, it declared in rainbow colors on its green side—a gift of the West Germans. The muscular young driver wore military fatigues and a bandanna round his neck. His name, he said, was Tecleh. He loped and was casual. He called to us in subdued English. “Ready to join the mountain bandits?” It was what their enemies called them.
Mountain bandits
.

In that heat, the three of us were bewildered children. We watched Tecleh lift our luggage, including Henry's massive duffel, onto the roof. He tethered it all there, covering it with a tarpaulin to keep the sand out. But he would not let us board yet. He was waiting for someone but did not know how to explain that to us. “A sick man,” he said. I imagined a leprous figure staggering toward us across the town's rubble heaps.

While we waited, four Eritrean nurses—two male, two female—appeared in the courtyard carrying a stretcher with a wasted shape on it. They eased it out of the gate into the laneway. The shape had the face of a young man, another Eritrean hero. A further two nurses—paramedics, aides—followed the litter, one bearing surgical infusion bags, the other a metal box with a red cross painted on it.

I watched Tecleh stretch a foam rubber mattress along the floor in the rear of the truck. The stretcher bearers loaded the young man onto this, two of them boarding backwards and then stooping to keep the stretcher level. When the sick man was in place, the two women bearers at his feet also boarded the truck and exchanged mumbled wishes and handshakes with him. Then all four dismounted and made room for the lean young men carrying the drip bags and the box of medicines. These two, apparently, were to travel with us. One of them, seeing the lanky American Henry about to take a photograph, called “No!” and held up a preventive hand. Perhaps they feared their Sudanese friends might be affronted to see, turning up in some international magazine, a photograph which showed that if one of the injured rebels at Suakin got ill, the Eritreans trucked him back over the mountains for surgery by their own doctors, their own team.

The two young men aboard began connecting a drip to a vein in the patient's arm. One of them opened the metal box and took out a syringe, some pain-killer already drawn up into it.

“Barefoot doctors,” Tecleh said. But they weren't barefoot. They wore the Eritrean plastic sandal which, it would soon become apparent, was one of the dress icons of the rebels.

“Trucking a paraplegic?” Henry asked me.

In the vehicle as packed, Tecleh, the girl, and Henry took the front. I was a little surprised that Christine let Henry ride at her side, in view of what had happened between them in Port Sudan. Perhaps she was letting me know now that the clasped hands in the streets of Port Sudan hadn't meant anything more than similar gestures between schoolchildren. In any case, I sat in the back with my legs hooked onto the opposite seat and bridging the body of the sick boy on the floor. Then, seated toward the rear, on the least comfortable seats over the back wheels, the two barefoot doctors!

The young man called gently to me from the floor, “What is your name? What is your nation?”

The truck moved. He closed his eyes at this early shock to the suspension, and also in exhaustion.

I was aware that he was going home, to the nation of his desire, that he was attached to his
cause
the way only such time-displaced eighteenth-century survivals as the Poles were. I felt a strange embarrassment as I spoke to him. I would never discover what his name was. Later I asked the girl, Christine, if she'd ascertained it at some stage on the road. She was often attentive to these things.

But she hadn't found it out either.

Our track out of Sudan and into Eritrea was at first a flat and unapologetic desert road. Sometimes it looped close to the Red Sea, and you saw a strange border land of vivid green reed beds, and among them a low, clapboard fishing village. These people fished in boats built on a most antique, high-pooped design, some of which could be seen offshore that afternoon. Made sedentary by the plenty of the sea, the fisher people bought their goods from the Beja nomads, who—according to all I've read—pitied them, and whom they despised.

Tecleh, the young Eritrean truck driver, shouting above the noise of the engine, made what sounded like one of his few set speeches, this one on how to behave at the last Sudanese border post, which was still two hours to the south. There were two policemen there, he said, one a sergeant. “Never sees an Englishman, never sees an American, never sees a Frenchman. No wife, nothing to make him happy. When he says,
Where is your passport
? you say you have the movement permit. You go to the border regions, you say. But you do not say,
We are going to Eritrea
!”

There was no single road, only a set of alternating tracks, a series of sandy, treacherous options. Along them that afternoon, as apparently on all other afternoons, the Eritrean trucks plowed, traveling empty up to Port Sudan to collect aid consigned to them—however much against the wish of Addis—and returning south laden. Supposedly, if you had crawled over the backs of these trucks, you would have found sorghum and wheat, Oxfam high-protein biscuit, water pump replacements, canisters of raw pharmaceuticals, and stacks of plastic bags to be filled with Eritrea's own surgical drips in deep sterile caves.