To Asmara (28 page)

The Camel Races

From outside, up the stairs of the bunker room Henry and I had been given, I heard a camel's frightful groan, that awesome, existentially discontented noise. The souls of the damned, the Armenian metropolitan in Khartoum maintains, speak through the throat of the camel. The camel debates life's misery with the sun. Etc. Etc.

Both Henry and I had been drinking tea. I was feeling a certain hollowness—I had been the girl's guardian since Khartoum and had become accustomed to it. In the new vacancy I spent the afternoon transmuting all my notes into two features—
The Times
might ultimately take them on the strength of what I would write about the coming ambush, if it ever occurred. The work cheered me. I felt fresh and sweatless and energetic in the bunker's dry air. Even Henry seemed calmer than he had at any other Eritrean place.

Hearing the camel lamentations, we both went to the door and looked up the dug-in steps to the ground level.

“Come out, gentlemen!” I heard Christine call, and then I saw her. She was sitting astride the neck and forequarters of a skittish one-humped beast she must have borrowed from a villager. She managed the thing well as it tried to wheel and went on lamenting. This was flamboyant business, her onboard-camel manner, entirely different from her usual style.

Coming farther up the stairs, I got a sight of her father, turbanned and shaven, sitting astride a second camel and holding two others by the reins. “Come, comrades!” he yelled. “It is the Hallal Front camel races!”

The light was still bright. “What about MIGs?” I asked.

“The MIG pilots are all in their mess back in Asmara, drinking Militta beer.”

I saw Christine laugh again. Masihi must have behaved well, like a papa, because she looked happy, a child diverted and enlivened.

Henry and I looked at each other and began laughing. This is the best day, I thought. The best day we've had in Eritrea. We had been rehabilitated by the reunion and the low humidity. We grabbed our bush hats and came out of the bunker to join
père, fille
, and the dromedaries.

The cameraman instructed us how to haul the beasts down onto their knees by their necks, how to mount them, where to kick them to make them rise. As I mounted mine, the camel uttered complaints and threats which filled the earth. I couldn't hear Masihi's jovial advice. Henry, however, handled his animal expertly, taking it for a canter among the shell craters. The skeletal children of this zone, whom earlier in the day we'd seen trailing to class, appeared in the shade of thorn bushes, hooted and placed splayed fingers across their faces. Christine rocked in her saddle and yelled, “Long-champs!”

Under Masihi's direction, I tried to steer my camel to the unroofed houses at the south end of the village. They marked the starting line in the proposed camel derby. The other three were all in position before me; my beast veered off on triangulations among the craters and the huts and bunkers and occasionally half knelt as if to throw me. Partly by my wrenching at his reins and partly by his own consent to joining his fellows, I got him in line for the start.

“Is everybody ready?” asked Masihi, grinning with the full breadth of his scoundrel charm. “Christine?”

“Partez!”
yelled Christine, and we were all racing, my camel as much through his willingness to run along beside the others as through any control I had over him. The other three were, of course, ahead of me; I could see Henry crouched forward on his camel's neck like an authentic jockey. Masihi was screaming, and Christine's head jiggled in gales of unusual laughter—she wasn't so much racing as stating her simple joy. I began to gain on her. But I saw Henry throwing his elbows wide now, kicking berserkly, urging his animal out in front. Masihi screamed certain joyous Gallic threats after him, but as far as I could see from my risky purchase aboard my camel's shoulders, Henry drew farther away.

I started to understand that Masihi hadn't nominated any limit to this race. Where did it end? Maybe at the escarpment which fell away down to the ravines above Jani where the militia had stopped us the previous night.

Ahead, near the edge of the scarp, two startling events occurred at once. Henry's galloping camel seemed to pitch willfully forward onto its knees, throwing Henry over its neck. Above its hump, above the pain and the comedy, the camel's knees seeming to splay, its bizarre joints shooting its limbs in a number of directions at once, a MIG appeared, and instantly another. In less than a second they roared on down over the rim of the plateau and were lost in the valley. The edge of the cliff cut their noise off like a knife, and all at once you could again hear the competitive eloquence of the camels. Henry's tried to rise, Masihi's screamed at being reined in. Christine had succeeded in dragging hers back to a canter. But mine seemed to declare an intention not to stop of its own will.

I got the impression that the finish line had now been reached. But my camel kept on, bearing me down the desolate road. At last the thing propped, bowed, and slid me with amazing gentleness out of my seat and forward into an aloe bush. Snuffling, it began to graze on a patch of gravel by the trail.

When I stood up, I saw Masihi and the girl trying to raise the stunned Henry to his feet. I looked then into the valley, where gobbets and surges of flame had begun to rise. The two MIGs maneuvered for space against Mohammed's granite mountain and shot across its western face still golden from the vanishing sun.

I glanced around to see if the others saw what I did. I thought of running to them and forming a primal huddle. Henry was still lolling on the ground. Masihi dragged him upright, at last put one hand on his brow, the other on his shoulders, and frowned. Christine stood still by her now docile camel. The MIGs wheeled easefully between the granite peaks and then made second runs nearly faster than the eye could account for. We had a wide view, though Henry wavered on his legs and couldn't focus.

“Fragmentation bombs,” Masihi yelled dispassionately.

We stared down fixedly through the slightly distorting lens of Jani's hot, rising dusk. Its river ran mainly rock, but loose and separate strands of water glimmered. Both arms were fed by a similar fall of boulders and strings of water flowing—like the stem of the letter Y—out of the south. These waters, which I think race away ultimately, fighting evaporation all the way, into the Blue Nile, were fringed with scrub where all day villagers had been waiting for the nighttime food share-out. Even from that distance and height, I could see along the edges of this foliage a flurry of gold and emerald cloth, a serpentine, panicked movement made subtle by distance. At the core of each disaster in the valley of Jani was a pulse of flame out of which climbed white smoke, fragments of foliage, and an outer nimbus of orange dust. Balls of white smoke rose from the Eritrean artillery placed in the mountains around. It struck me that these two MIG pilots must be true gauchos to have come in so late in the day, so low, confusing the defenses.

Later Masihi would utter the opinion that they were hotshots (his term) transferred from a career of rough, low flying above the heads of Somalis. On the Eritrean front they were new brooms sweeping clean. They were like Major Fida, who'd come to the Eritrean front from Western Somalia and who'd similarly struck low—and been struck in return. But these two were getting away with it.

Though our view was so complete, from that distance everything seemed to have a leisurely effect. Both aircraft turned away from the flak now, acquired height within seconds, flashed away southeast. We watched until their black outlines were lost in the night rising up from the Red Sea.

Henry had managed to stand and was shaking his head, trying to clear his vision. “Son-of-a-bitch camel!” he was muttering. “What's happening here?”

His vision cleared and he apparently saw smoke and the glint of a dozen fires in the valley below him. He pointed. “Holy shit!” he said. Perhaps his bruised brain was suggesting to him that all this had been brought on by his fall from the camel's back.

Masihi remarked, “The Ethiopians hit the place eighteen months ago. Killed thirty people. I filmed it.”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” yelled Henry. It was a scream of amazing volume. We knew he wasn't talking about the camel and its lesser malice now. “Those barbarians!” he screamed. “Those fucking barbarians!”

Masihi didn't take much notice of him. “Come, Christine,” he ordered his daughter. He dragged his camel around by the reins, back toward the village, and so did she. It was as if they had been together, yanking camels over plateaus, for eleven years instead of eleven hours. “I have to get a camera down there,” he called in cursory explanation.

I had an argument with Moka about going to Jani myself. His plan was to travel on, parallel to the front, till we reached Nacfa, a bombed and ruined city, second in holiness only to Asmara, toward the eastern end of the Eritrean highlands. He had planned to begin the move before dawn the next morning. If I went back to Jani with Masihi, his assistant, and Christine, I wouldn't be able to return to the plateau here before tomorrow night. It was difficult to know whether Moka's insistence that Henry and I move on was based on some timetable I was ignorant of but which Tessfaha had set for him. But I still felt rebellious: If Tessfaha wanted me, let him tell
me
. Let him bloody well appear!

Christine was loading a tripod and sound gear into the back of her father's truck. She did it with an easy grace, with an air of custom. Perhaps for his own protection, Masihi had given her what she hadn't had while traveling with us: a job.

Lady Julia had also made it clear she wanted to go down to Jani with the cameraman and his new assistant, so that Moka had little choice but to give in to us. The agitated Henry could not be moved, however. A barefoot doctor in military fatigues looked at his pupils and an elected village health worker called Mohammed Mohammed, in turban and blue jacket, fed him dosages of EPLF paracetamol. By Masihi's truck, when I took my kit there to load it aboard, the camel which had thrown Henry was grazing with soft prehensile lips on the savage two- or three-inch thorns of an African acacia. Masihi himself was also waiting there for the driver.

“It's a heartbreak,” he confided in me, “I won't be able to get any footage till the morning. If these awful things are to be filmed, they should be filmed in their rawest state, before the wounds are dressed.” He hauled a Betacam in its snazzy fabric bag into the back of the truck. “What I film by the time we get down there, or in the morning, won't have any distinction to it. It will resemble some
chi-chi
documentary segment by CBS or French television.”

On our way back down into the valley after dark, Moka kept hailing the drivers of other trucks ascending to the plateau, six-tonners loaded with supplies, a captured Russian bus taking soldiers from Zara to the Hallal Front. The figures from the bombing varied. Their inexactitude caused distress to Lady Julia. During a toilet stop called by Masihi, she surmised whether the women we had seen queuing at the clinic the day before had been harmed in the bombing. As Lady Julia got tireder that night, she became more agitated. She took on more of the feverishness and bewilderment which till this morning had marked Christine.

When we arrived, village militiamen were digging a large pit on the edge of the groves of Jani. By the clinic, which was still intact, shrouded figures—thirty, it was said—could be seen surrounded by a circle of keening women. Closer to the food dump were placed the blankets on which wounded lay. Pot-bellied children seemed to make up half the figure, though I lacked the hard journalistic concentration actually to count. I saw Masihi, his Eritrean technician, and Christine walking among the trees, discussing the advisability of trying to light the scene. Men and women on the edges of the clearing lamented loudly and in compelling tune.

At last I risked looking full-on at one of the victims, a girl of perhaps thirteen, bare-headed and naked except for bandages which ran tinted with blood or disinfectant from her ribcage to her hips. Her face seemed empty—she had withdrawn from it. She was waiting somewhere within herself, exactly as Salim Genete's niece had on the terrace at Orotta.

At the sight of her, a gush of the tea I had drunk up on the plateau an hour or so before ran out over my lips. I looked around, obscurely ashamed, to see if anyone had noticed. Lady Julia was staring at me levelly.

“I'm sorry,” I told her, spitting. “I can't get used to this.”

“People are permitted not to be used to it,” Julia told me.

Some of the head wounds Jani's barefoot doctor wisely did not dare to touch. She was waiting for a surgeon to arrive from Zara.

In the meantime, everyone, I noticed, the wounded and the attendants, seemed to suffer from a strange pallor.

“Why is everyone so white?” Lady Julia asked me
sotto voce
. She believed some chemical agent had been dropped. But I pointed out to her that even the river oaks and the thorn bushes had taken on a white complexion.

Masihi, bustling past with Christine and his assistant, explained the phenomenon: A fragmentation bomb had hit the powdered-milk dump, over beyond the sorghum. An Etna of powder had been thrown into the air, had been sieved up through the branches of the trees. The gift of the EEC had blanched all the shocked and upturned faces and had come down even on the wounded.

Now and then, I matter-of-factly embraced this tree or that; I muttered primitively against the trunks of river oaks. Lady Julia, a genuine veteran, did not seem to be as troubled now that she was here at the site. She knew the way of the world better.

At some stage we all ended holding up surgical drips, me over a young farmer who told me his name was Mohammed Mohammed, the same name as the health worker who had been dosing Henry's headache on the plateau above us.