To Asmara (22 page)

The veteran climbed up to where she was sitting with the baby. He and the woman exchanged a knuckle-wringing handshake—the baby attached to her right nipple prevented the normal full-shouldered Eritrean greetings. After more conversation, Moka waved for us to join him. “It is my friend Askulu,” he called to us.

We began to climb toward the woman. She'd brought an unexpected air of bounty to the morning. As the baby continued to feed, she extended her right hand to each of us. She wondered would we like breakfast, sweet tea and
injera
. Lady Julia explained that her friend Christine was too ill to eat. “Oh yes,” said Askulu. “If she does not get better soon, she should take some of our tetracycline.”

They all said that: “
our
tetracycline,” as if Dow and Pfizer and Bayer produced a cruder version.

“Of course,” said Askulu when she heard we were going to the camp. “But the womenfolk should stay with me. Perhaps they do not need to see the Ethiopian men in such quantities. And I have a fine shack here.” She laughed and sat the baby upright, trying to clear its wind.

“This is my beloved little Beret,” she explained. The baby's mouth emitted a bubble of milk as the woman began to speak in that voice mothers seem to use universally when they talk on behalf of a speechless baby. “Beret does not like Himbol, with its nasty dust and its heat which gives her a rash. She is happy to be here where the climate is more pleasant. Indeed she is.”

Askulu tucked and wriggled her breasts back inside her jungle-green shirt, and buttoned it one-handed. Standing, she then led us down a few steps in the mountainside to the standard Eritrean hut half-submerged in stony earth. I noticed a plastic-coated rattan carry-cot sitting on a table made of ammunition cases. Askulu lowered the baby onto a blanket on the table, unfastened its loincloth and began to change it. Singing in Tigrinyan, she spread Johnson's Baby Oil on its cherub thighs. I wondered what her source of supply was for that stuff.

When the child had been put down mewling in its basket and a mosquito net placed over it, Askulu went to sit with the two women where they were, on the clay platform in front of the plates of wheaten bread and the pump thermos of sweetened tea. “Sit down,” she ordered the three of us men, who still stood by the door, hesitant to intrude on the rituals of motherhood. With a sigh she sat down herself beside Lady Julia.

Lady Julia said, “Of course we've met, Madame Askulu. We were on morning television together at the BBC!”

Askulu laughed delightedly. “But you have changed a little.”

“I took off some weight,” Lady Julia admitted, making a mouth. I couldn't imagine her as a plump woman, bereft of her lean authority. I realized I'd seen Askulu, too. During the great famine of '85 she'd been very visible on all English-speaking television. It developed that she had now been elected to the Central Committee of the rebel movement. Even now, as she attended to her infant in She'b, she was an emissary of the General Secretary, a man called Issayas, a military veteran and an intellectual.

I knew the name of this nearly invisible leader Issayas. By choice, he remained inaccessible. I hoped that after my return from the ambush I might be able to use my service to the Eritreans as a lever to get an interview with him. His second name was Afewerki. He was believed to be—by such partisans as Stella—the world's most successful rebel leader. If he made, said Stella, half a gesture toward the world press, ravenous for personalities as much as for news, he would become what she called “an international glamour-puss.”

Rising from the bench, Askulu looked into the baby cot again to check on the repose of the baby Beret. Her voice softened appropriately as she inspected the child. “The latest rumors are that Issayas once gunned down two Ethiopian judges and poisoned the food of a political rival. I mean the man
has
been a rebel and engaged in rebel business, never gentle on either side. But I know him. These are the libels of both the Saudi and Israeli secret services.
N'est-ce pas
, Beret?” She laid a finger interrogatively on her daughter's cheek.

As Askulu and Lady Julia continued to speak of British media figures—the special emissary still occasionally checking on the now sleeping infant—Christine Malmédy leaned back on the clay bench, her eyes half-closed.

“She should stay here and rest, at least two days,” said Askulu.

Christine opened her eyes for a moment. “We have to keep going,” she said. “My friends have things of their own they want to attend to.”

“Masihi is always hard to locate,” said Askulu unnecessarily. “As I am, too. My husband is back in Orotta. His letters can take three weeks to reach me—I am always one step further down or up the road than he thinks.” She chuckled at this idea of conjugal messages chasing her among the mountains.

Lady Julia moved away from the now somnolent Christine to give the girl's body more room to subside. Askulu sipped from her tea. She did not drink from the cup in the usual, more audible, full-blooded Eritrean way. Nonetheless she gave the normal gasp of pleasure after each mouthful. Tea was the greatest luxury even members of the Central Committee had.

“There is so much activity, too,” she murmured. “Especially after our victories near Asmara. I mean, just down there …” She gestured with her thumb toward the bunker's southerly wall. “… just beyond the Nacfa Front.”

I remembered these were the successes for which Salim's niece had perished.

“We all have to be careful,” she continued. “Our agents tell us there was a panic in the Ethiopian command. Our friend Haile Mariam Mengistu visited the city after the military debacle and summoned his chiefs of staff and his commanders from along the front. I speak of just last week! He accused them of treachery and of being incompetent, and he used profanities, filthy words. All the people on our general staff who knew him when he was an officer, they all say that of him—he has a profane tongue. But one of the generals speaks out, answers him in the same terms! Mengistu orders that the man be taken out at once and shot. Three other officers at the table protest very strongly. They tell Mengistu there have been too many summary executions. They will not stand for summary executions among their own. Mengistu begins to bluster and then walks out of the room. Within a day, two of those generals have been shot, five have been removed from command and stripped of all rank and sent home. We are now facing a very nervous corps of generals and—may I say?—a very nervous Mengistu.”

She lowered her voice even further, as if she did not want the apparently sleeping Beret to overhear. “It makes us worry about chemical warfare. We know our friend has stocks of the stuff left from the days of the Emperor. American chemicals. What chemicals he has from Russia we do not know. I have a gas mask, but how does one fit a gas mask on an infant?”

For a while, as we sustained a horrified silence, she considered the ceiling of logs, reading omens in the patterns there.

It was by Central Committee member Askulu's fiat that Lady Julia was persuaded to stay in that cool, matriarchal bunker. Even though I had interviews to do and Major Fida to meet, I wanted to stay there, too, in this ambience of straight talk, mother's milk, baby oil, within the wholesome animal redolence of baby Beret.

But Moka led us off to our own hut first—a more traditional, conical thatched affair, yet recessed enough into the hillside so that only the bravest bomber pilot could have come low enough to see that it was distinct from its mountain. Henry chose to stay there, watching two emerald lizards, splay-footed like geckos, that ran up and down the mud brick wall and climbed lingeringly over each other's bodies, barking with a
yip
sound.

Moka knew I had my mind on reaching the commandant, whose hut was somewhere in this valley. I don't think he deliberately delayed me on our way there that morning. By now the sun was high and most of the prisoners sat beneath brush shelters, away from its full glare. The volleyball games were over. Some men, however, played skittles with a small rounded stone and spent shortwave radio batteries.

When we reached the commandant's home and office, we found him sitting under a tree—in a pit lined with sandstone seats—conferring with a number of Ethiopian prisoners, some sort of prison committee. The commandant was that same lean Eritrean official we saw everywhere throughout the country, from the same gene pool as Tessfaha. Seeing us, he stood and began to shake hands in the exhaustive manner of the Horn with each of the committee. They trailed away back into the camp, speculating with a mild flicker of the eye, but not too energetically, on what my being there might mean. I can't have looked much like a repatriation official from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that was above all the man they were waiting for.

The commandant led us into his bunker. He poured me tea from his pump thermos. That and the flowered
injera
dish seemed to be the staples of Eritrean kitchenware. The sugar in the tea, instead of livening me up, brought on a sort of blunt exhaustion. Moka explained in Tigrinyan that I wanted to see Major Paulos Fida in the officers' camp. The man gave an answer—judicious, polite, and firm.

When he finished, Moka turned to me with a kind of pleading in his eyes. “Major Fida isn't here. He's gone away.”

I asked him if I could be told where Major Fida had gone to. I said that I had a friend, Stella, who was in contact with Fida's family in Addis.

Moka passed this on to the commandant, even though I could tell from his face that he already knew what the answer would be. After the commandant had spoken, Moka turned back to me.

“He doesn't know where Major Fida is. Major Fida was moved. He doesn't know where.”

I began to grow rebellious. They had no right to deny me this meeting with Fida, or to stonewall me if something had happened to him.

“Is he dead?” I asked. “If he's dead, his widow is entitled to know. So are his children.”

There was a discussion between Moka and the commandant. At last Moka said, “Major Fida isn't dead. His health is good.”

“Then I can see him,” I argued.

There was more discussion. “I'm afraid that that is not possible,” Moka conveyed to me at last, pleading, his eyes enormously yellow and desperate in his thinned-down face.

“Major Fida is one of your most famous prisoners. Some very well-known journalists have interviewed him. You can't use him as you've used him and then just say he's not on tap any more. You can't use me either …” I felt the undue weight of the journey I'd made to see Major Fida's melancholy face. I'd believed that however hard it might be to find Masihi, the reputedly reasonable Eritreans would present me to Fida without argument.

The commandant kept earnestly explaining things in Tigrinyan. He was being very concessive, and I felt a little sorry for him—he was clearly a man defending received orders.

The discussion was interrupted by the squealing arrival of a small camouflaged truck outside. I could see through the doorway its canvas-flap sides. It was the sort of vehicle in which Lady Julia had come from the west the night we had first met her. Out of the vehicle stepped yet another rangy Eritrean officer. You could tell him not by any insignia but by his long trousers and his hard-bitten, mid-thirties look. He carried a sketch pad in his hand and, yes, it had to be Henry's, a guess which was instantly verified, since the officer held the door open and Henry himself got down from the vehicle. His Scandinavian features came through pinkly under his tan. Whatever had happened, we stood to hear a good rant from him.

From the back of the truck jumped two armed soldiers, very young, with that peculiar unmarred glitter you saw in the eyes of Eritrea's child-military.

The officer ushered Henry first down the bunker steps but then pushed ahead to knock soundlessly on the door jamb. He entered, making space for Henry to pass into the middle of the room. The two young soldiers waited outside on the stairs.

The Henry I now saw had a faint, nauseated smile on his face.

“You're not under arrest, are you?” I asked him.

“Don't be fucking stupid,” he said tightly.

The officer had taken the sketchbook to the commandant. It lay open at a panoramic charcoal which was apparently Henry's work. A Tigrinyan discussion went on for some time—perhaps no more than twenty seconds, but it seemed too long to me. I began to feel that the Eritreans were turning mean-minded, that the bureaucrats had suddenly developed their occupational disease, the one which raged everywhere else in the world but from which, until today, the highland rebels had seemed free. I watched them now pawing over Henry's inane sketch as if it had significance.

“What's the trouble?” I asked, loudly enough to bring a silence. I'd hoped that by now Henry would have been profaning and—to use the American idiom—
kicking ass
. But he remained standing with that half-smile of sickly anger and said nothing at all.

My outcry caused Moka to join the conference at the commandant's desk. The commandant pointed out certain aspects of the picture to him. I was about to go and join them, a critic on equal terms, when Moka picked the sketchbook out of the commandant's hands and brought it to me.

Moka said pleadingly, “It is a very wide drawing. It is very …”

“Panoramic?” Henry suddenly suggested.

Moka gave a small affirmative gurgle in his throat. “We don't let people take photographs from such angles. The Ethiopians wait for such pictures, panoramas, to appear in magazines.”

Then, without any of his normal apology, he tore the sketch out and gave it back to the commandant. All the while, Henry looked him in the eye but said nothing. I could all at once imagine the three of them—the officer, the commandant, Moka—as functionaries in a future tyrannous state. There was now an increased redolence of high-handed bureaucracy. I was tired enough to resent it, to add it to the denial of access to Major Fida, and so to make an ardent demonstration.