To Asmara by Thomas Keneally Page B

frightened adults were sometimes less than half a block away.
    Whenever he used the word fiancée , the girl and I would find ourselves exchanging glances. She pitied him in her wide-eyed, stark, economical way, and I both pitied and envied him. He was still active in the question, after all; he was still working and angling away for the liberation of the Somali. Over the karkedeh juice and soda in the Sudan Club I was all at once conscious, in a superheated sort of way which cried out to be treated with strong liquor, that I was by contrast outside Bernadette’s affairs, that the time when I could even have pretended to be taking part in them was gone even by the night she ran off in the center of Australia with the jailbird Burraptiti.
    What is obvious—apart from the pity of it—when Henry uses the term fiancée , is that he wants the listener to know that his affair with the Somali woman is a matter of honor and not of mere convenience. During his period of exile from Ethiopia, Henry spent three months with relatives in New York, chivvying U.S. Immigration officials to let Petra into the United States and—more than that—demand that Mengistu issue her with an exit visa. He made the rounds of offices in New York and Washington.
    â€œI said to them, ‘You fight to get goddam Refuseniks out of Russia. Well, Petra’s a Refusenik.’ When Mengistu sent in that ’85 offensive against the Eritreans—you know, the one they call the Silent Offensive—I frankly hoped it would work, that the whole thing would be settled and Mengistu would smile and issue exit visas to everyone who wanted to leave. But the Eritreans held and Petra stayed home under house arrest.”
    Henry himself went home to Sault Ste. Marie for Christmas after Mengistu had expelled him. Over the punch, he records, his uncle said to him, “Why didn’t you tell that Mengistu to go fuck himself? He needs you , that monkey!”
    â€œBut the fact is,” Henry told us in the Sudan Club, “I needed my villages. I got these dreams of silt washing off the hillsides, clogging the dam walls, turning them to these shallow ridges. Nightmare stuff. Genuine nightmares! And my uncle—he was just like the rest of the public in the rich world. You couldn’t speak to any of them. They couldn’t understand what drives an aid worker any more than they could understand Himalayan monks. And you can’t explain anything to them; the words in your mouth don’t mean the same as the words in theirs.
    â€œNew Year’s Eve, I drove to this park I knew from my high school days, right above the dirty waterway between Huron and Michigan. I drank a bottle of vodka and ended up in the hospital with hypothermia! See, I wasn’t equipped any more to live in the West.”

Waiting on the Coast
    The Eritrean-run villa in Port Sudan where Henry and the girl and I waited for our transportation south to Suakin and Eritrea stood in a broad alley by the Red Sea salt pans. It had its own high-walled garden of sand, a little echo of the Sahara. Scattered about this garden were piles of plastic bottles with the label of a West German brand of bottled water. Port Sudan’s water supply was, according to Eritrean analysis, unfit to drink.
    The house was run by wounded veterans of the Eritrean war. One by one they approached us during our first hours there and shook our hands with that solemn thoroughness characteristic of handshakes in the Sudan and Eritrea.
    A young man who edged forward on crutches seemed to have nothing inside the legs of his pants except thin metal substitute limbs. He was nonetheless able to wring our hands. He sat with us at a small table in the hallway.
    â€œYou brought no wood?” he asked, winking at one of his fellow veterans. He was the villa wag.
    Not knowing what was coming, we admitted we’d brought no wood.
    â€œYou should have brought wood. It costs like gold in Port