To Asmara (39 page)

The colonel left me to a desolate day. I slept in a slick of sweat and woke from a dream of Henry and a court-martial to find that the noise which had interrupted the dream was the yapping of one of the pert vermilion lizards who lived in the thatch of the roof. I thought, Tonight, unless she's moved again, I'll see Amna. But I couldn't look forward unambiguously to that. It wasn't only because in last night's
sewa
exuberance I'd embarrassed myself and her. It was a lack of daring in me. And Henry had had it—the terrible Henry, the man whose gestures you couldn't predict. His massive intentions toward the Eritreans had misshapen his character, twisted him to madness and sickness. But he had daring. And if it
was
true, as Tessfaha said, that Henry would have a picture of us both on his office wall, that itself was madness. There wasn't any warmth between us to justify a picture. And yet he had daring, and that seemed the most significant thing to me.

And I returned to the vast fact: Henry being willing not only to sell villages and prisoners by the valleyful, but also to put himself in a position where no one, himself included, could be certain he'd actually done it, the technology being—as Tessfaha said—unreliable.

I somehow wanted that degree of venturousness. I actually felt chastened not to have it. And I felt desperate, since its lack accounted for the loss of Bernadette—accounted, too, for my helplessness with Amna. A better man than Henry, of course! A man who had risked no one, especially not himself.

Henry wouldn't have lost Bernadette, I assured myself. Henry wouldn't have behaved judiciously, wouldn't have balanced love and vengeance as, in the pattern of my bank manager father, I had.

All that day in the village near Asmara I rehearsed the disconnected scenes of my morally impeccable and wise search for Bernadette. How I had gone to so much trouble, but never the right kind!

I can scarcely remember the Darcy of the day after Bernadette vanished. I suppose a little shock was justified. I remember Freddy Numati, the Pitjantjara elder, reassuring me on the question of whether Burraptiti might misuse her in some way and leave her beside the road without water.

That was in a way the reassurance I wanted. For the moment, I was looking for reasons not to go straight off in pursuit. For Bernadette to run away with Burraptiti was, I told myself, a temporary act of vengeance against the tribal council and against me. I thought it almost too stupid and foolish to be taken seriously. She was
trying
to make me believe she and Burraptiti were lovers. But I was sure they hadn't been—not in Fryer River anyhow—though I couldn't swear to what was happening now.

On that matter, it wasn't just the hubris of a bad husband that made me believe Burraptiti and Bernadette weren't in some sort of affair. The nature of the fight between us, between Bernadette and the council, the whole balance of behavior would have been different, that's all, if Burraptiti had been an early element in it.

As vengeance anyhow, her escape worked well. In a way, I let it work well. Perhaps I wanted to be able to go to her and say, “Look, you made me give up the best job I've ever had.”

To describe the decline briefly, I found my credit had gone in the eyes of the tribal men. Questions to do with land title, petrol-sniffing, police liaison were not brought to me any more.

Within a week of the disappearance, I drove to Alice and then flew to Darwin, searching for her in both places, but she and Burraptiti, if together, were not in the main towns. Her parents and friends in Melbourne had not seen her either, and I would find out later that the Yangs hired an investigator to find her. If he had any success or not, they didn't tell me.

I concluded that, apart or together, Bernadette and Burraptiti must be on the remoter roads somewhere, perhaps in the northwest, traversing some immensity of dust and spinifex grass. Even though Burraptiti had committed car theft, the nursing sister wanted to leave it to the tribal council and the loosely structured Aboriginal bureaucracies in Alice and Darwin to sort out the return of the truck Burraptiti had taken from her.

As for me, I believed the police might be heavy-handed with a Chinese girl who traveled the country with a Pitjantjara jailbird. Besides, I sensed that Bernadette, whatever she might forgive me, wouldn't forgive that.

At the end of six weeks, however, about the time I resigned my job at Fryer River, I decided to bring the police into the search. They thought it very strange I had waited so long, and even suspected me of foul play against my wife and her “lover.” Interviews with Freddie Numati and others reassured them on that point.

And then they found Bernadette but would not tell me where. She had asked them not to, had implied there'd be violent scenes if I appeared on her doorstep. I could tell by the way they counseled me that it was very likely to be a doorstep she shared with Burraptiti.

I had good contacts among both tribal people and sundry whites up in the north, in Darwin, where I was somehow sure she was now. Because if she'd been in Alice Springs, I would have known. Alice is not big enough to hide in. But Burraptiti had contacts in Darwin, a group of loyal “brothers.” Although they would have been from different tribes than his, their brotherhood had been fused by experience of the police and of jail.

I flew to Darwin but had no success tracking her. Then I went back home to Melbourne and began to scratch a living as a freelance journalist, particularly on Aboriginal matters. I had already done pieces for
The Times
in London and become a sort of tribal correspondent. The British press were very interested in such material: the wash-up of empire, if you like. Some of my old Melbourne friends, less radical and more nationalist than when I'd last seen them, complained that
The Times
liked to take every opportunity to cast Australia as a junior South Africa. They complained about a British middle-class taste for tales of neocolonial oppression in picturesque surroundings, such as the rich desert Fryer River stood in. I found myself defending my small journalistic output. I thought, “I'm not paid enough, I'm not happy enough, to have to do this!”

For a while I contemplated a lawsuit to make the police tell me where they'd found her. But from contacts in the Aboriginal Affairs Department and from journalists returning from the north I heard that these days she
was
sometimes sighted in the streets and shopping malls of Darwin. One journalist reported that she was pregnant. The question was, of course, whether it was my child or Burraptiti's.

As soon as I could manage to do so, I took the long flight to Darwin once again. By now, close on a year had passed since Burraptiti and Bernadette had fled Fryer River. If this journey showed any daring, it was of a very measured kind.

In the bunker in Eritrea in which I recollected it, Darwin seemed more fabulous and strange than the caves of Orotta. You flew to it across absolute desert and discovered it all at once on its low, mangrove-bordered harbor. In its small history it had been destroyed three times by cyclones and once by the Japanese, who bombed it for some months in the 1940s. Its destruction marked their southernmost triumph, a flimsy triumph to match the flimsy town.

These days the city liked to adopt a suburban air. But the most startling antipodean events could still take place there.
Kaditja
men, punishers of tribal violations, might pursue a wrongdoer to town and, adapting to modern ways, find plausible methods to punish him, running him down with a vehicle or—in a case of which I had knowledge—tailing him from a hotel to a vacant plot of land and setting the grass ablaze there as he slept. And so the city's assumptions about itself—that it's a modern city with suburbs—don't really convince people. Everyone knows that the forces of ancient law or of ancient air turbulence might carry it away in an instant.

Her name was not in the telephone book, though there were other Yangs in town, merchants and restaurateurs. I could tell when I called in to the Northern Land Council, staffed by Arnhem Land Aborigines, that they knew where she was living, where she kept house for Burraptiti. One of them, whose cousin had been in jail with Burraptiti, admitted to knowing the address. “But you know there'll be a fight if you visit them,” he said.

“I won't start any fight,” I pledged.

“Not you. That bloody Burraptiti bloke might.”

I explained that I wished only to see that she was well looked after, and the Arnhemlander said that he was sure Burraptiti
did
treat her well, a bloody sight better than he'd treated his black wife down in the desert.

“Is he drinking a lot?” I asked.

“He's the sort of bloke always drinks too much.”

The Arnhemlander pointed to a poster on the wall of the Land Council office, a photograph of tribal men and women bloated and bleary with liquor. The legend read, “Don't Let Booze Destroy Our Culture!” Before the European coming, an Iwiaja man like this Arnhemlander and a Pitjantjara like Burraptiti would have been remoter from each other than Venus from Mars. Booze, like the law, had imposed a shared fraternal grief on both the tropic north and the desert.

Ultimately though, the Arnhemlander relented. He was a compassionate man who could see how badly the
business
, as he called it, oppressed me. On the promise that I wouldn't call in the Northern Territory police in their wide brown hats, even if Burraptiti attacked me, the Arnhemlander wrote down the address.

“I'll take some wine there.”

“If it's for Bernadette,” the man said, “take a bottle. If it's for that bugger Burraptiti, take a gallon.”

I drove to a shopping mall, a branch of that true faith of Californian mercantilism you find in every tropic and temperate zone. I wanted to buy her a particular South Australian chardonnay of her liking. It was more than I could afford in this new era of living entirely by my writing. I took it from the liquor store freezer ready for drinking, even though there was a risk that the tropic day outside would turn it tepid too quickly and spoil the taste. I wanted to give it to her ready for the palate. A perfectly chilled memory.

Walking down the mall's central aisle, however, I saw Bernadette emerge from a supermarket. She was pushing a stroller in which sat her beautiful but very young child, its eyes Cantonese and, of course, a desert brooding in them. Bernadette saw me, stopped an instant, nodded, smiled indulgently, and then pushed the stroller away. I hobbled after her. Condensation from the chilled wine had wet the paper bag through. It split and the bottle fell, landed and shattered on the floor. People stopped, stared an instant, but then misread the whole event as a small shopping accident and went back to their ruminating movement along the shopping arcades.

The accident halted Bernadette, too. She turned and slotted her hips between the handles of the stroller. I would later consider it significant that she did not give her baby a sight of me.

“Oh, for God's sake, go away, Darcy,” she said.

“Your color isn't good,” I said stupidly. But she wouldn't answer me. “I wanted to know whether you were well, and if he hit you.”

“I'm happy,” she said, tossing her head. “I have a reasonable life.”

I thought this an extraordinary phrase. I was fighting a delusion that the cure was only a touch away. I reached a hand out for her wrist.

“Come back,” I said. “I'm finished with Fryer River. Or it's finished with me. I know more now.”

“Please,” she said gently. “Don't try it.”

“Would you consider … I mean, I'd look after the baby like my own.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Bernadette, casting her eyes upward. “Do you want a scene?”

And of course, even at this limit of pleading, I didn't.

“Well, do you need any money?” I asked. Of course, if she had said
yes
, I would have been hard put to find any.

“We do very well. The government looks after us. And there are Pitjantjara mineral royalties.
He
has his share of those.”

She stared at the glass on the tiled floor. I noticed for the first time the dress she was wearing—floral and not very elegant. It must have come from a secondhand shop or else from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. I wondered if her natty parents, who'd plumbed hills of gold to make a Cantonese princess of her, had ever seen her like this. “You were going to bring me some wine, were you?”

I shrugged. I began to clean the jagged fragments away with my boot, pushing them under a bench.
You see
, my gesture meant,
I don't want anyone hurt
.

“It was an ill-fated little present, Darcy. Wasn't it?”

I admitted that perhaps it was.

“So maybe you should piss off!” she told me.

It was the pungency of that phrase which affronted me. As I blinked, she began to wheel the stroller away again, and I found myself walking helplessly behind her. By one of those circular seats placed around a potted palm for the comfort of shoppers, for the wives of Jabiru uranium miners come to Darwin for a day's spending, she halted a moment.

“You know, there are plenty of precedents for the intermarriage of the Chinese and the Arnhemlanders,” she said, very solemn in her explanation, “and so Burraptiti doesn't feel out of it all up here, even though he's a desert native. They feel superior to
us
. So it doesn't have the same dangers as getting in with a white girl.”

For an instant, a morbid determination toward self-punishment, the certainty that the ill will of the tribal council had worked, was in her face. I moved up and thrust a piece of paper with my Melbourne telephone number into her hand, and this time she let me.

“Just as well the wine bottle broke,” Bernadette told me. “We don't drink vintages, David and I.”

So something was rich and right between Burraptiti and her. Because it had a conjugal ring, the way she said “David and I.”