To Asmara by Thomas Keneally

the Sudanese specialty called twisted fish, accompanied by karkedeh juice and soda water, Henry began to talk a little about his history.
    He told us he came from near the Canadian-American border, from the industrial city of Sault Ste. Marie. This coal and steel town sits astride a neck of the Great Lakes, some of its bitter suburbs in Canada, the other half in the United States. As he described it, geographically and in terms of culture, it was its own state. His parents died when he was ten, and he was raised by an uncle for whom he felt some affection. But he disliked the shameful squalor of his home city. He liked what he called “the honest squalor of other parts.”
    â€œI studied agriculture at a cow college in northern Michigan,” he said.
    â€œCow college?” asked Christine.
    â€œSorry, missie,” said Henry. “Agriculture.”
    He had an agricultural ranginess, was tall to the point of stooping, with a thatch of hair which had once been golden but had now turned a fairly flaccid nicotine. And he was an old cat in more than African terms—he told us he’d worked for the Peace Corps and for Southern Unitarian Aid in Sumatra, India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and now Sudan. His specialties included soil conservation, deep water holes, small community dams. “I have in my time seen the light enter thousands of faces as the water flowed, friends!”
    He had been put in charge of his organization’s Khartoum office just recently. “But it’s a tough business. Listen, you just can’t get medicine or grain or water drills into the parts that need them most. Into the Southern Sudan, I mean, into Darfur and Kordofan, let alone into the Bahr Al-Ghazal or Equatoria. It’s the civil war. Last month, for example, some rebels handcuffed two of our drivers to the steering wheels of their trucks and then incinerated the trucks! How’s that for a death!”
    The French girl blinked. Then she asked with her usual suddenness, “Are you married?”
    Henry paused in a way which made me suspect inexactly that he had a wife somewhere. “I have a fiancée,” he told us. “She’s a Somali and her name is Petra. She’s under house arrest in Addis. I’m still negotiating her visa.”
    I seemed to remember Stella mentioning a particular American who went around lobbying people, wanting pressure put on the Dergue to give his girlfriend a pardon and an exit visa. I wondered had Stella been talking about this man, Henry? I hoped not, because I believe she said also, “Everyone knows the woman’s probably dead.”
    â€œI’m bad at languages,” he confessed a little irrelevantly. “I let Petra do most of the talking for me, even though I know a little Amharic. I get by on gestures and bullshit. My only talent, though, is sketching.”
    And he took a few minutes to do us a passable sketch of the waiter.
    Mellowed by the twisted fish, he returned to Petra’s story later in the meal. “I knew her for nine years,” he said, “and I thought I could look forward to knowing her forever. That is, till the big expulsion.”
    I wondered why he hadn’t married her and given her the protection of his passport. But there could have been trouble with her family, who probably didn’t approve of the liaison.
    In any case, in the year he was thrown out, the good rains of July and August had ended a famine in Showa province. It was a point of history at which Henry could congratulate himself that his small wells and dams had saved some hundreds of lives, if not thousands, and might make the future return of cyclical famine less likely in at least a few villages. And then, with little warning, the Ethiopian government, the Dergue, its premier the army officer Haile Mariam Mengistu, successor since 1975 of the Emperor Haile Selassie and displaying the same autocratic habits, expelled SUA from Ethiopia.
    â€œHe