To Asmara (2 page)

So, as we all saw on our television screens, apart from the inhuman drought at which no one could be personally outraged, the rock star blamed above all the rebel Eritrean attack for the just fears of these stark-eyed Tigrean farmers, of their wives swathed in the eternal patience of many-dyed cloth, and for the unsatisfactory thickness of the limbs of the pot-bellied children. It was in these Eritrean rebels that the human malice of famine was found.

At that time, I knew very little about this satanic rebel movement in the Eritrean highlands of the Horn of Africa. During my earlier assignment in the Sudan, and throughout my friendship with the generous Stella Harries, the BBC's official correspondent in Khartoum, I'd met a journalist or two who had been over the Red Sea border into Eritrea. I'd been impressed by a French cameraman who worked for the rebels, an exotic, turban-wearing figure called Masihi, who brought a few rough-cut film documentaries out of Eritrea to show to interested people in Khartoum. There could be found in Eritrea, according to the few journalists who knew, a massive war which went largely unrecorded, except of course by the French cameraman. Even in Khartoum, this war in progress in the Eritrean mountains, on the flank of the Sudan—this war which had now begotten a string of burned-out aid trucks—seemed to rouse only occasional interest.

About the same time as the rock singer's broadcast, Stella herself visited these rebels for a few weeks and came out very thin but—if you could judge from her letters and the radio programs she made—very partisan about the Eritreans. The situation she described was a complex one, and her programs were broadcast in Britain late at night, when I'd been drinking, and when the chains of political causation Stella describes were a little hard to follow.

Just the same, I began to seek out a little literature concerning these Eritrean vandals. One night, in a church hall in London, I attended a lecture by a Labour member of Parliament on the topic “Free Eritrea Now!” The event was one of those dismal, ill-attended, cold, damp, but lively sessions of the type you often see advertised in
The Times
. The politician's remarks were punctuated by plumbing noises from the nineteenth-century walls.

Drinking coffee in the lobby of the hall after the lecture ended, I was aware of the reserved presence of half a dozen Eritrean men and women. Two of the women wore padded jackets of military origin, as if they'd recently been engaged in the sort of attack the rock singer had denounced. The men wore sportscoats and watched me calmly over their mugs of steaming coffee. They were old soldiers of the Eritrean cause, these men and women—I'd heard from Stella Harries that only the most brilliant of the veterans of the Eritrean war with Ethiopia got these overseas postings, representing their rebel movement in Europe as once Benjamin Franklin and John Adams had represented the American revolutionaries.

I considered their well-made African faces and their limpid eyes. I tried to envisage them destroying with grenades the food of the nine-centimeter-arm-diameter children of the Horn of Africa.

A French Girl in the Sudan

It is four months since I saw the rock singer's newsclip, and three of us are waiting on the Red Sea coast of the Sudan in heat so downright it's best to ignore it. Besides myself there is a lean, Nordic-looking American aid worker called Mark Henry, and the French girl. We are in an old barracks from the days of General Kitchener, a barracks—it seems to me—built for Rudyard Kipling and his
h
-dropping Cockney redcoats. It is time to begin writing things down and muttering things into my tape recorder. Because at the start of such a journey I'm frankly apprehensive of what I will perceive and meet, because perhaps of what my wife, Bernadette, would call my primness, I'll work in the past tense. It's a good way to put a distance between myself and the rawness of events.

First though: An outsider going into the rebel-held parts of Eritrea for whatever purpose can travel only by way of the Sudan. You fly to Khartoum and then to Port Sudan and then come south on the back of a truck to a town of ruins called Suakin—this town with its barracks. The Eritreans run a clinic here for their maimed.

Is it too fanciful to say that my companions and I are suspended between states? Between the Sudan and the unfulfilled Republic of Eritrea; between the desert coast we still inhabit and the mountains we're bound for? Even our passports are behind us, deposited with the intellectual veteran who manages the Eritrean guest house in Port Sudan.

My marriage is somewhere behind, too, but inadequately discarded, and the other two carry the same sort of freight—the girl Christine carries her peculiar childhood, and Henry his oddly noble attachment to his Somali woman.

Enough heat-induced portentousness, though!

The eastern gate of the barracks at Suakin opened directly onto the Red Sea; it was only a step or two from the lintel to the fever-blue water. Latrines for the damaged veterans of Eritrea hung rakishly out over the sea. With the consent of the Sudanese government, the rebels brought their maimed up here to the coast, to Suakin and Port Sudan, because there was nowhere farther south, in Eritrea itself, where the limbless or crippled could wheel their chairs safely by daylight.

The three of us stood by this gate and inspected the richly blue Red Sea. It hurt the eye, yet Christine held its gaze, lifting her chin and mopping her neck—which like the rest of her stopped just short of being bony—with a brown bandanna we'd bought together in Khartoum. She turned to me and arched her eyes in a way that said, “Well, the Red Sea. Close up!” Then she turned back to the courtyard, and Henry the American and I followed.

A young Eritrean man missing a leg sat there in a wheelchair surrounded by a fence of Eritrean false limbs. On the foot of each prosthetic leg sat a black, lace-up shoe. He held one such leg-and-shoe combination in his hands and rubbed black polish onto the leather. This fresh-faced shoe shiner had already carried on a conversation with us in excellent English, telling us in its course that he'd trodden on a Russian mine down near Asmara.

“We saw them in Port Sudan,” Christine had said in her flat yet quite exact English. “All the young Eritreans at the clinic. They shined their shoes, too, and went out for a walk in the afternoon.”

Though I remembered sharply they hadn't walked—they'd wheeled their chairs and lurched along on crutches.

“Walking is very good for those in the clinic,” the shoe shiner told us, closing the subject.

Now he was still preparing the boots on all these disembodied legs so that at sunset his brothers and sisters in the clinic could don them and set out on their crutches or in their wheelchairs for an evening promenade. They would flash their dazzling toecaps around the little bay where the scrawniest of Mecca pilgrims bathed—the ones who couldn't afford anything better than the old steamer between Suakin and Jeddah.

As the three of us could hear just at the moment, in a ward by the second gateway, the one into the lane, less proficient English speakers than the shoe polisher were holding class. “Hamud lives in the city of Asmara,” they called from their beds and their wheelchairs, “but his cousin Osman is a farmer in a village in Barka.”

The shoe polisher told us, “Yes, I know Masihi well. There is no one in the Liberation Front who does not know Masihi.”

I noticed that the shoe polish had turned nearly to oil in the heat, but he scooped it all up deftly with his cloth. There were no drips. I looked at the girl. She was agog for news of Masihi the cameraman.

“I remember,” said the polisher, “when we took the town of Barentu. I was in the infantry then, the Hallal Guards. At dawn we were already all around the enemy, the soldiers of Ethiopia. We sealed the road to the east. Then we came forward over a plain of stone and we saw the buildings of the town, naked in front of us. As we went, I heard a noise behind me, and I thought,
Tanks!
for the noise was the noise of a machine. But instead it is Masihi and he is carrying his big churning camera, sixteen millimeter, which makes the same noise as a Russian bus, and he follows us, right behind! The stones in front of us, in front of the buildings on the edge of the city, are bouncing with bullets. For still Ethiopians remain there, and their officers have told them we will cut their arms off if they become prisoners, cut off their feet and stuff them in their mouths. And then Masihi and his camera and his sound machinist … they pass right through our line of infantry, they move faster than us, and they seize the town. They step over the outer trenches. Ethiopians are running away all around Masihi—he could reach his hand out and touch them. He has taken their spirit though. He has conquered them with his camera lens. They think he is a weapon. Masihi, who wants to capture only the morning light! He turns around in those houses on the outskirts and photographs us as we arrive …”

The boy laughed at this extreme cinematic style of Masihi's. The girl, Christine Malmédy, even in that solid heat raised her right hand over her eyes to cover her delight, which was deadpan in her normal style and yet fierce. With her other hand she caressed her right shoulder. Pulling forward until she was stooped. Making the story her own. A tale of her lost father.

I had once, in Khartoum, met Masihi—or Roland Malmédy, as he'd still been when Christine had last seen him. I knew that deadpan wasn't his style. I felt a pulse of anxiety for her. If we found him, what would he make of her? Would he look at her noncommittal face and wrongly think she was stupid?

I'd met her first a week before in the Hotel Akropole in Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan. It was a Thursday evening, a few days before I was supposed to leave the capital for Port Sudan and cross the border into rebel Eritrea. I was dining with two Norwegian acquaintances, both of them army officers and friends of my own friend Stella. Half the Norwegian army seemed to be involved in the aid business in Africa.

The Akropole is renowned among European travelers in the Sudan. It is an old-fashioned place, the doors of whose rooms, which are generally booked out, open directly onto the lounges and the dining room. In the dining room, a sweet-fleshed variety of Nile perch is served superbly every evening.

The Akropole is, of course, owned by a Greek family—the Nile, from the Delta in Egypt up through all its cataracts and courses to Lake Tana and Lake Victoria, has always been a Greek highway. It is exciting to think of those relentless Greek traders climbing the cataracts, coming to this elephant-trunk-shaped meeting place of the White and Blue Nile, doing deals with the nomads of the Gezira before there was even a city here or a rumor either of Christ or of the Prophet.

The Sudan had, until a few years before the night I went to dinner there, a Marxist president, Numeiri, and during his time all the aid agencies had been expelled from the country. The Greek family which runs the Akropole had, however, kept all aid running, arranging for the clearance of customs documents, for the delivery of goods which arrived at sandy Khartoum airport or by way of the great harbor of Port Sudan. My friend Stella swore by this family of experienced African operators, these two youngish Greek men and their wives, and an elegant mother in her sixties.

And in the evening, the Akropole's turbanned Sudanese waiters moved around the dining room with the calm style of men who have canny and spirited employers. I loved to sit and watch them do their stuff, bringing soup and fish to the tables full of journalists, aid and medical workers, engineers, and businessmen of the city.

On Thursday evenings, after the cry to prayer from the El Kabir Mosque brought on the clear Nilotic night, dinner was followed by a late-release movie shown on a video machine on the roof.

We'd finished the meal and were talking over coffee when we noticed a young European girl waiting some five steps from the table for a chance to interrupt and introduce herself.

I thought there was something infallibly French about her. Young Canadian, American, British, and Australian aid volunteers were plentiful in the region, but I knew this girl was not one of them. She had that slightly underfed European look, though she was not abnormally short. Her face was an untidy, European one, full of planes. It lacked blandness. I could imagine it in time coming to express a middle-aged existential despair.

She'd made herself up in a careless but vivid sort of way to come to the Akropole. Her hair was brunette and was heavily and sensibly cropped for travel in this dusty republic. She wore a halter-neck sleeveless top which would have earned her corporal punishment under President Numeiri and could even land her in trouble under the present law of the Sudan. This unwisely chosen garment suggested that she was a recent arrival in the country.

I went through a sort of dumbshow, raising my eyebrows to let her know it was all right to intrude if she wanted to. She saw the signal, stepped forward, and began speaking in accented English. “Mr. Dar-cy! You are a friend of my father's, I think. I am Christine Malmédy.”

The army officers and I ran through the list of our African acquaintances, which in my case wasn't very extensive. Before we'd finished she said, “They nickname him Masihi. You may know that name. But his true name is Roland Malmédy. Do you know him now?”

“Masihi?” I asked. “The cameraman?”

She nodded.

In fact I knew him, the filmmaker called Masihi. But one of the Norwegian officers had even been into Eritrea, and announced now to the girl that he'd seen Masihi working “in the field,” as the Eritreans referred to their besieged nation.

As if we wanted to flatter her, we began telling her all at once about her father. How he was a legend in the region, a sort of cinematic Lawrence of Arabia who came over the mountains into Sudan every few years with appalling footage of the war, footage of napalm raids by the Ethiopian air force from which the sizzled flesh had not been cut out. Polemic film, as Masihi liked to call that stuff. He would show it to the journalists and the aid workers in Khartoum. I had seen his footage during my first visit to Sudan.