To Asmara by Thomas Keneally Page A

chose us to make an example,” Henry forlornly told us in the Sudan Club. “He was gearing up for this eighth great offensive against the Eritreans. He told governments and aid bodies not to give any food or other materials of any kind to the Eritreans. Most of us continued to. And some of the SUA officials, guys more senior than me and more full of opinions, said this and that about his shitty policies. That landed SUA and me on Mengistu’s list of hostile bodies. And the boys at the Ministry of the Interior in Addis didn’t like me having a Somali girl. So I was on the hit roster in any case. Mengistu threw us out with his real enemies, the French crowd Médecins sans Frontières . That’s who he really wanted to get.” He stared into the lees of purple juice in his glass. “But all this goddam expelling didn’t extend to Petra. She stayed! Oh yes, she stayed.”
    The girl leaned forward. “How old is she?”
    Henry waved a hand. He took out a wadded diary, extracted a photograph from it, and waved it in front of us. It showed a woman as tall and thin as the people of Somalia generally are. “Graduate of the University of Addis Ababa,” said Henry. “No cow college for her, a real seat of learning where it was hard for Somalis to get admission.”
    Her father, the American told us, was a surgeon from the Somali city of Mogadishu, and she had worked with the Red Cross in that region called the Ogaden, the great plain in the southeast of Ethiopia which the Somalis consider their own but which was—by decree of the UN—part of Ethiopia. Somalis still persist in calling the Ogaden “Western Somalia,” but—Henry said—Petra avoided even in private such emotional and dangerous terms as that. She was very careful in case anyone mistook her for a Somali rebel. “The Amhara are a great tribe, friends, but you wouldn’t believe how antsy they can be about the others, about the Oromo, the Somalis down in the Ogaden, the Tigreans in the north. Above all, of course, of the Eritreans. If you’re Somali, you don’t have to go around using terms like Western Somalia to get into trouble. On some days they were likely to arrest you just on the basis of your face and your background!”
    I don’t think Henry meant to give us Petra’s full history. He was drawn out by the girl’s dogged questions: “How old is she?” “What is her family?” etc., etc.
    I wondered if my story and Bernadette’s ran as close to the surface of the skin as Henry’s did, whether it could be so easily started running?
    Petra was already working in the Addis office of SUA when Henry first arrived there. “But it was Fetasha that made us friends,” said Henry.
    I’d heard of the period known as the Fetasha , the Search. When the Emperor had first been overthrown by the Dergue, there had been excitement among the robust minorities in the capital: the Somalis, even the small group of Eritreans who were students at the university, and all the others. But Mengistu and the Dergue had by the time of Fetasha disabused them of all hopes. The regime armed gangs of unemployed youths with leftover American weapons from the Emperor’s day and sent them into the streets as vigilantes to keep order, to demand orthodox revolutionary behavior, to take vengeance on those who showed a flicker of fear—fear being misread as false politics.
    Anyhow, Henry used to escort Petra home to her small walled house behind St. George’s Cathedral through the impromptu roadblocks of the Fetasha . He would at one time, he said, stay there for more than a week, keeping guard over her in her tiny rooms.
    I imagined them holding to each other behind shuttered windows, listening to the armed and feckless children scurrying by in sandals, M-16s in their hands. The shouts, the threats of the armed children, and the screams and whimpers of