To Asmara (36 page)

In a clump of trees in front of us, a number of trucks were starting up their engines after sheltering all day from the Eritrean observers high up on their lethal spur. One of the trucks flashed its lights. I watched, believing and unbelieving with equal ease, as Johanes walked up to its cabin. We stood about meekly as he chatted with the driver. Some other trucks gave off flashes of cabin light and snatches of shortwave music and Amharic announcements.

Johanes returned to us.

“This is our truck,” he told us, smiling slowly.

I hadn't known there would be one.

We crawled into the back—it was a large Ural. I remember how Masihi handed the camera up to his daughter, who was already standing on the truck tray. Definitely two professionals on their way to a shoot, casually transferring their gear. What would her French psychiatrists think of this, the refugee from shock treatment operating without opiates behind the Dergue's lines?

The truck started up and there was a lot of rowdy gear-changing, nothing subtle or tentative, and then we began to move south, passing other vehicles arriving at the front with military plenty. I saw, in a hiatus between dust, assorted command vehicles full of Ethiopian officers dressed Cuban style in Castro caps, bandannas around their mouths. Music surged forth from their shortwave radios for a second or two. Then our cumulative dust choked it.

In a broad river plain we swung away from the established road, cutting our own swath across the banks of grit and boulders. Soon we'll be on our own, I told myself, and I can start to breathe again. Yet then we rejoined a line of trucks. My chest began to pain dully. I had lost my calm for some reason. Was there air at the bottom of this Amharic sea? A young, disconsolate Ethiopian soldier indolently waved us through a checkpoint. I heard a small bark of laughter from Masihi, who had been craning his neck over the sides to watch the road ahead. This was a new procedure, he told me later, this ploy of joining in the mêlée. The other times he had crossed the line, he said, there had been a lot more creeping. Whereas this was a bus run. This was pure fish-in-the-water stuff.

Throughout this phase, Henry seemed to lie comatose. His head was propped against his great duffel bag. When I regained my breath, I lay down parallel to him. Christine, I noticed, was deeply asleep, her head jolting. I felt a moment's parental smugness, seeing her get her rest like this. She would need adequate sleep. And yes, her manner in Khartoum and Port Sudan, her dazed, mute manner, was exactly that of a child who has come out of a profound fever and is relearning the world, studying its mechanisms. But now where will she go, I wondered, if she quarrels with Masihi, if he stops filming—or, these days, videotaping—for half an hour and she begins to look at him merely as a lost middle-aged Frenchman in a desert?

On this question, this late-night, strange-place anxiety, I let the stars numb me. Now and then I was aware that the traffic had diminished all around us. It became obvious that we'd taken to a rough mountain road. The truck pummeled me, but I did not come out of my daze until I felt it slowing. Looking over the edge of the tray, I saw we were surrounded by some twenty men in peasant clothing. All of them carried arms.

“It's the Ethiopian wheat militia,” Masihi told me. “They serve the Dergue for handouts of wheat.”

Johanes and Moka had stepped down from the truck cabin and seemed to be engaged in jovial talk with these men. Masihi himself vaulted off the back of the truck and joined the conversation. It seemed to be in Arabic. There was laughter. Masihi mimed filming them, and they laughed again and held up preventive hands. It wasn't hard to get the joke. He must have said something like,
What if I make a film of you gentlemen and send it to Mengistu?

Joking over, they waved us goodbye. Later in the night, when the half moon had come up over this beautiful, arid high country, a more strenuous roadblock all at once stood in our way. At first I presumed it was manned by Ethiopians or wheat militia, and it was only after staring over the side for some time that I saw a girl holding an assault rifle and understood that these were soldiers of the EPLF. Under the moonlight they talked loudly and confidently. Their hand gestures weren't stealthy. They behaved like owners.

Two of them, a girl and a boy, climbed aboard with us. I smelled their somehow pleasant musk of sweat and antique dust.

Before dawn we came with them to a village of standing mud brick houses. There may have been bunkers round about, but this town—unlike Orotta and Jani and Himbol—had an identity above ground as well. Perhaps an Ethiopian would say of a place like this,
There you are! Stop resisting and we'll let you live in the open air
.

In the hut we were shown to, a beautiful peasant woman, very young, swathed in emerald and bearing a marriage bangle through her nose, brought us sweet tea. Henry had little to say and seemed sullen. I thought of Lady Julia in Endilal. I would have enjoyed her company here, a few
I would have thoughts
and
I means
over the numbingly sweet morning tea. As it was, this Eritrean girl was alien and silent within flamboyant cloth, within her set of peasant modesties, and nothing was said.

Letter Drop

We were there five days. Every morning I expected Colonel Tessfaha, who had gone to such eloquent pains to recruit me, to appear with instructions. He didn't. There was much tedium. We were asked or perhaps ordered—with the Eritreans you couldn't always tell the difference—to stay indoors during the day, when reconnaissance planes appeared in the sky. If we weren't already so, both Henry and I grew dull from the tedium.

In the evenings, however, we were allowed to socialize with the soldiers who had brought us through the lines, and with their more numerous comrades. I presumed that all of them waited in this village, as I did, for Tessfaha's instructions. They always drank some opaque and bitter
sewa
in the evenings, but their talk wasn't simply pub or party talk. They'd quiz Henry and me about every aspect of life, politics, and opinion in the United States and Europe—their interests extended as far as the Australian federal system. There would be pauses while those rebels who understood English translated what we had said into Tigrinyan or Arabic, and further sober questions would arise and need to be answered. We were chastened and stimulated a little by the seriousness with which we were accepted.

Moka came into our hut very early on the fourth day. Henry was still asleep, and the Eritrean sat by the bench on which my air mattress had been spread and murmured for fear of waking him. “The letter you wanted to give to Major Fida. You still have it?”

“Of course,” I said. “Do you think I would have thrown it away?”

He told me to get it. I rooted through my backpack, among dwindling rolls of toilet paper, tubes of suntan lotion, and shirts and underwear reeking of sweat.

“We do not have time for tea,” Moka said apologetically when I produced the letter. (It is an Eritrean axiom that nothing serious can be undertaken without tea.) I had also found the letter Stella had written and wanted passed to Fida, and I added it to the first. There was no need to tell Moka.

“And do you have any books you have finished?” he asked.

I was a little confused by the question, but then understood he was soliciting books for Fida. I had finished a novel called
World's Fair
by E. L. Doctorow. It might well fruitfully add to Fida's bemusement in the face of American culture, politics, and morality.

I wondered if Moka wanted both the book and the letter handed to him at once. That wouldn't be acceptable to me.

“You can have the book, Moka. But I have to keep his wife's letter with me and give it to Fida in person.”

He wheezed. “Ai-ai-ai! You can keep them, you can keep them,” he sighed.

I followed him out into the early morning light. Two reconnaissance planes, one in the northeast, another in the southwest, quartered the sky, keeping an eye on the occupied province, the rebel nation.

We walked for five minutes. We passed one guard resting under a tree, who called a lazy greeting to us, and then another positioned under the eaves of a hut. Neither of these men would normally have let me move freely by daylight.

We reached the farthest and most isolated house in the village. Moka paused by the door jamb and began to knock.

“
Salaam
,” someone called briskly from inside. Beneath the thatched eaves, Moka ushered me through into the interior of the place. A tall and very muscular man in military fatigues, a man not as pared down as most of the Eritreans, was waiting there, standing by a table. I believed that he must have been an intelligence officer, a friend of Tessfaha's, who would try to get Fida's letter out of me.

“Mr. Darcy,” he said.

I nodded. As he smiled at me I tried to convey wariness and strict professional standards.

“You are a friend of my friend Stella?”

“Stella Harries. Yes. I am a friend.”

I thought he was going to base an appeal for trust on our mutual friendship: Give me Fida's letter, because no friend of Stella's could be a barbarian! Later I was a little astounded that I had not known straightaway that this was Fida himself. And now he introduced himself, and I recognized him at once from Stella's photograph, recognized even his voice from the tapes she had made.

The three of us sat down. Tea was brought now and drunk. I put the letters beside his cup. “There is something from Stella, and a longer letter from your wife. I suppose that's the more important one.”

He behaved like what they used to call “a man of breeding.” He did not tear open the envelopes and devour what lay inside. He glanced at them almost as if they were ambiguous, like examination results or a medical report. He would save them to read in privacy.

He smiled at me. “And the book?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Another American.” He
did
turn that over, read the quotes on the back cover, went searching for details of the author in the first couple of pages. “I shall be an expert in American writers when poor Ethiopia alters its allegiance and falls in again with the Americans …”

Moka growled. “They say on the African news of the BBC that the Russians might throw the Ethiopians out of bed—not the other way around. The Russians are so tired of Mengistu!”

“Ai, yes,” said the major.

I had my mouth open to ask the question: Why was he, a p.o.w., on this side of the lines? But he turned to me and began talking before I could begin. “I insisted on seeing you, Mr. Darcy. I was in a position where I could do that. But we all hope that you won't say you met me here. The Eritreans hope that, and so do I. Not even to tell Stella. I trust you don't mind that?”

I gave them both my assurances. Moka wheezed joyously once I'd uttered them.

Fida rose and went across the room to where a burlap bag lay in the corner. He took from it a letter of his own, brought it back, and placed it on the table in front of me. “That is a letter for my wife. If I go to God in the next week or two, you'll hear of it, and you'll send the letter to that West German address on the envelope, and they will get it to her.”

“What does
go to God
mean?” I asked him. “Are you under some sort of sentence?”

For there were rumors that the Eritrean military dealt with offences fairly summarily. In a confused way I wondered, Had he been condemned by one of their military courts?

He raised a hand. “No, it isn't anything like that. My fellow prisoner, my cellmate you could call him—Captain Berezhani, whom Stella met—may have thought he was under sentence, for he hanged himself six weeks past. He gave way to the purest despair and condemned himself. That, too, is in strictest confidence, since Berezhani's family are Christian and would be demented to find the poor fellow had done that. But me? No, I am not under sentence. But I am sure you don't have to be told the whole situation here is dangerous. Not for you, of course. But
I
am already out of the zone where prisoners are normally kept; I am already back in my own zone, the occupied one. So by all means use your imagination now or afterward, but say nothing.

“This letter, though … if you have heard nothing one way or another about me by the time you leave Eritrea, then there will be no need for you to send it, and you can tear it up.”

“Literally?” I asked. “Rip it to pieces?”

“Please do. It is just that certain motivations of mine might worry my wife if I am not present on earth to explain them to her.” (I noticed how theological his English was:
Go to God
had now been followed by the oddity of
present on earth
.) “I needed to meet someone of whom I could say with certainty,
he
will post the letter. He will not decide that it is unwise or inexpedient to post it, as perhaps one of my captors might. He will post it.”

“But how will I
know
whether to post it or rip it up?”

“If I go to God, it will be well known in this region. The cameraman will tell you, for example. It may … well, let us say it will be news.”

He reached across and put his hands on top of mine.

“I thank you for your service to me.”

I had an urge to ask him about Tessfaha's proposed ambush—was he engaged in that in some way? But I knew I wouldn't get a proper answer, so instead I let a normal conversation start. We talked about Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and about the meaning of
perestroika
and
glasnost
. We talked about the Poles. He listened to me speak of crime and homelessness in New York. Like everyone who has been to that city for a week or two, I was expert on that. I can't remember how it came up, but he showed me his arm, the one which had been broken when he ejected. He put it through some basic exercises and praised the pin job the Eritrean surgeons had done.