To Asmara (32 page)

Such children suffered the cells of the Gebi barracks, Amna told me. They might be trucked off shackled to Addis or, if things went really wrong, jettisoned dismembered along Asmara's faubourgs. “There are avenues fringed with palms,” Amna told me. “There are great roundabouts where yellow flowers bloom all the year. A civilized city! But Afan made it mad in this way. Passing traffic was
meant
to see!”

She explained that her father was a quiet man. He took pains to dissuade his daughter from doing anything flippant enough to land her, trussed up, in a place like Gebi. In high school, though (Amna announced, without seeming to know that the same cliché was uttered in the West), there was a certain fashion to rebellion, to being a member of the old ELF, whose most visible members were certain glamorous intellectuals and various grizzled tough men who had once been NCOs in the Ethiopian or Sudanese armies.

The ELF divided its rebels into five zonal cells, according to racial and religious divisions. Amna's father, a moderate Muslim, like his cousin Salim Genete down on the coast used to doing business with all kinds—the sort of man who belongs to service clubs, said Amna, because he actually
enjoys
doing business with all kinds—saw dangers in this. “We will have war zones like China, he told me. And bandit chieftains! I wanted to be a Sierra Maestran, and he knew it. He knew also that he could prevent me from being one, that I would obey him to that extent.”

“Sierra Maestran?” I asked, though I had dimly heard the term from Stella. There were boys and girls who took off with their backpacks to the Ala hills south of Asmara. In revolutionary innocence and in tribute to Fidel, they gave a Cuban name to these hills: the Sierra Maestra.

But though prevented from vanishing into the Sierra Maestra, by the age of sixteen, Amna claimed, she was a runner for an intelligence cell which included schoolteachers and older pupils.

It was the ambushes and other humiliations the Sierra children imposed on the Emperor's forces on the road south of Asmara that helped bring about the fall of Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah.

“I was very pleased,” said Amna primly. “I had reasons of kinship, of family, to be pleased.” For after the Emperor vanished, the leadership of what emerged as the new government, the Dergue, belonged at first to an Eritrean, General Aman Andom, “a relative by marriage.” Andom knew how bitterly the Eritreans would always contest any foreign possession of Asmara and the highlands. He knew, too, said Amna graphically, the cost of napalm and high explosive—“It is as expensive as gold leaf. If they chose to coat all the highlands with gold leaf, it would be less wasteful than paving them with napalm.”

The Dergue and its young Captain Mengistu had Andom shot dead on his doorstep in Addis for recognizing these Eritrean verities. They believed that with their fresh strategies and Marxist probity they could reduce Eritrea to a province by one firm, sharp move.

I watched Amna demonstrating with her hands the movements of the Dergue against the knapsack-toting kids of Sierra Maestra—one blow from the direction of Massawa on the Red Sea, one from Tessenai to the southwest. But the Eritrean rebels met both. The Ethiopian army was as convincingly repulsed as it had been under the Emperor.

But of course the Ethiopians continued to hold Asmara itself, and on the trams of Asmara sat the composed student and intelligence runner Amna Nurhussein, now a pharmacy student in an unsettled but determined nation.

“What was your main work for the rebels?” I asked her.

“I was not working for the rebels,” she told me with her concisely edged English. “I
was
a rebel.”

“But your main work?”

“Fraternal work.”

“Fraternal?”

She was aware—“fraternally”—of the other Ethiopian races who had been forced to serve in the tyrant's army and who had little truck with Amharas, with Addis, or with whatever imperial concept presently possessed it. Together with her physics professor she prepared a weekly newspaper, printed on an illegal Gestetner machine. “Hard news,” she said. “From the home regions of the conscripts.”

I wondered what an Asmaran undergraduate's concept of “hard” news might be. I also began despite myself to imagine a Frankfurt friend, a British or American journalist, from whom she'd be likely to hear such a term.

Just before her arrest by Afan, the Cubans sent ten thousand regulars to help Mengistu and the Dergue crush Eritrea, and she and her colleagues, chastened, stopped speaking of the Ala hills as Sierra Maestra.

Asmara, she said, had many elegant villas and apartments and looked altogether far more urbane a city than the scattier capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. But Afan, of course, the Ethiopian security police, for the time being set the city's tone. They raided her parents' villa one evening at dusk when her parents were themselves out at some social event. She still considers it fortunate that she was home, for it was known that if the suspect was not on the premises, Afan might take other members of the family as replacements.

She had to wait while the police, in the manner of police in more places than Asmara, casually plundered the place, taking the shortwave radio, the recorder, silverware from the dresser; flicking over the titles in her father's library and confiscating this volume or that.

I noticed she related Western-style, one could say
bourgeois
details. Such as that one policeman emerged from the parental bedroom with her father's best suit and three of her mother's dresses carried over his shoulder. She showed an old-fashioned outrage over that. The business of being a revolutionary had not undermined her sense of a certain holiness in possessions. At some time in the future, I could see by the way she spoke, she wanted her own dresses in her own wardrobe.

While this loot of the clan treasures continued, a young policeman sat at the end of the dining room table, keeping a pistol leveled at her, and with a soft smile continued to refer to her as “a whore from the front!”

After the pillage, she said, she was forced out into the garden and thrown into the back of a Polish Fiat. She was aware of neighbors looking flinchingly from behind the grilles and shutters at their windows.

“I felt a rush of blood and pride up into my head,” she said, placing all her fingers to her forehead. “It's very important for prisoners to feel that—a sort of pride in being arrested, the one chosen.”

“Pride?” I asked. I could not imagine myself feeling pride at such a moment. Though I did remember then, among the reverberations of the Dergue's artillery, the prideful graffiti in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw, where after torture and before execution by the SS, partisans had written their forthright scrawls on walls of the cells, brave assertions picked out in and honored by luminous paint these days. Perhaps that was what Amna was talking about: a sort of foreshadowing of that future luminosity the Polish graffitists were sustained by in their last hours.

I had by this stage of my interview with Amna begun to take notes. And
pride
was the first word I wrote after her name.

They had taken her across the city, to the old Italian cavalry barracks at Gebi her father had warned her about. Even under the Emperor, Gebi had been the interrogation center. There were grand stables, which had been converted into cells, each stall high-sided and dank. The walls threw groans of other prisoners upward till they became diffused and disembodied among the stylized rafters.

She was willing, for the sake of validating what the gardener had said to us earlier in the day, to throw in further details. She was left overnight without food or water. There was nowhere to urinate except the corner of the cell. But her father had old friends from the days of the Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce, before the Dergue put an end to both institutions. The network still existed. There were Eritreans still retaining influence to whom her father could appeal.

Above all, this strange pride remained. The tyrant had shown how much she had hurt him by throwing her into such a hole.

By the next morning thirst troubled her, as they meant it should. There were other instances of what she called in the bunker “indirect means.” They would sometimes lead you along corridors or across small courtyards in which you would see the lolling cadaver of some young Eritrean, hands and eyes bloodily gone. Across a parade ground which must have seen all the exotic uniforms of the Italians, the British, the Emperor's cavalry, they led her to a colonnaded barracks and down a stairwell. In the basement the air stank and was full of groans and whimpers.

They opened a green door. It seems that the term
green door
was uttered by both the Ethiopian police and the rebels as a synonym for torture. In the place she now found herself, a large space with a drain running down the middle of the floor as if to collect the run-off of the torment practiced here, she was made to stand to one side and witness the water torture of a male, a member of her cell, a young economist.

She spoke to me not so much of the economist but of the officer in charge of things, a man named Lieutenant Dawit Wolde. Throughout, Wolde occupied a desk in the corner. He had an in-tray and an out-tray, said Amna, just like a normal civil servant. It was unlikely, she says, that this Wolde had any fear of Amnesty International or of the Geneva Conventions, but nonetheless she doubted that Wolde was his real name, suspecting instead that it was some
nom de guerre
. She set herself to memorize his face and behavior. He was a man of about thirty, often unshaven but always neatly dressed. His manners fascinated Amna. He spoke in a normal, level voice, and though he could get angry, it simply introduced more emphasis into his speech. He never shouted or gesticulated.

Lieutenant Wolde told her in Amharic that the economist had given everything away. They needed her simply for confirmation of some details. “So there's no bravery left to you,” Lieutenant Dawit Wolde told her with a shy smile.

What made her fearful, she said, was that he seemed to know about her pride. She'd readied herself to suffer like the economist, but she had not prepared herself to be denied heroic chances. The economist's dulled eyes flashed across her face, and she thought there was accusation in them.

So that was the nature of her torment, to watch water bounce off the economist's head, again encased in an orange plastic bag. Her cell, the EPLF in general, had devised a sort of tactic: when interrogated, you offered first the names of rebels who had just recently, perhaps in the last week, escaped through the lines or had gone to the Sudan, West Germany, the United States, or England. She named a man called Tesfapaulos.

“Everyone starts with Tesfapaulos,” Lieutenant Wolde told her. Even the economist, he claimed, had begun with
that
name.

She gave him other names, the recently escaped, and after two hours, the economist being in a coma on the tiled floor, Wolde unexpectedly let her be taken back to her horse stall.

When she was returned to the stables, across a yard in which three women prisoners in foul and tattered dresses were cooking millet soup on an open fire, she was dispirited. “The torturers hadn't punished me as I expected. And they took their time. Unhurried.” Their leisureliness seemed to have made an impression on her, the unhurried time they took. They had cured her, she said, of what she called “my young idea”—the idea that she was a special rebel and that they were frantic to torment her. She had to join the line, to wait to be questioned and ground down in Wolde's mill.

She seemed to think it was the prosaic timetable of torture, its bureaucratic slowness, which was the great danger in the end.

By this point of her recital, I was not as preoccupied with the thump of the 122-millimeter shells over the hill and around the bunker as by her long wait—that day in 1978—for water at dusk. Suspended in thirst in the holy city of Asmara, she waited to be drowned, confused, blinded with pain—in the city thrust up eight thousand feet above the Red Sea, urbane in its climate, noted in its scholarship both Coptic and Islamic, and removed in its essential being, its refined avenues, from the Ethiopian tropics of torture.

“I thought it was my city,” she confessed. “It was not the city of the torturers. I came to believe it belonged to the prisoners.”

I knew I'd lost the gift to be impassioned by a city the way Amna was about Asmara. As the artillery barrage began to diminish outside the bunker, her emphasis was less on imprisonment than on that capital set on the high road from the Red Sea to the Kassala province of Sudan, on the high road, too, to Gondar and Gojjam, Ethiopia's turbulent western reaches. She seemed to have the naive but touching idea that all the invaders wanted it exactly because it was a temperate and civilized home, but that they came to it without the appropriate talents to enjoy it. In her mind, no earthly power could feel happy without the option of a villa in Asmara.

And Asmara never sold itself away. Asmara seemed to be, to her, Eritrea focused on a mountaintop. It never gave over to the ancient kingdom of Axum. It permitted the Turks to build towers in its foothills but never declared itself theirs. It was awarded to the Italians, in the time of the European carve-up of the Horn, but only because it was so resistant to the Ethiopian Emperor. Through the Italian and British years, sixty-two of them, Asmara—in Amna's interpretation of history—kept its clear, high head.

Interpreting the ceremonies of torture for me, who had never known them, Amna spoke of how she became sharply aware of their casual,
ex tempore
nature. One day electrodes, the next the circle of rope in which knots were tied to fit over the eyes. This rope, called “the tear-maker,” they tightened from behind when they remembered.

“I wondered if there was a textbook,” she confessed. “Something they had from the old Emperor … or from the East Germans, who were now advising them. Was there a manual which told the order to work in? Or is it part of the science to work on whim?”