To Asmara Read Online Free PDF

exactly true—I drank with Stella when she was at home. But she knew the ropes and had a reliable supplier. She spoke Arabic well, too. For anyone who didn’t, the dangers of being found with a black-market bottle were considerable enough to make you hesitate—jailing and flogging and public humiliation. Besides, the stuff cost two hundred Sudanese pounds a bottle, and as a freelance I wasn’t well enough off to dispose lightly of that amount of money.
    â€œDo you want some khat ?” the Nuba policeman then asked me.
    The girl was ignorant of the subtlety of this question, I was pleased to note. For it implied I was taking her home for sex, and the axiom even among the aid workers was that sex was mightily enhanced by khat . I knew, too, that my buying the khat would be the policeman’s price for overlooking Christine Malmédy’s bare arms. I had been very happy until now behaving paternally toward the girl. Now the Nuba had offended me with the other possibility. I had no desire, and the question was why, and the answer was only partially Christine’s childlike scrawniness.
    Stella had told me the going price for a wad of khat was about twenty-five Sudanese pounds. I took out a collection of five-pound notes. The Nuba languidly placed a heavy wad of the drug on my lap.
    â€œThe lady should know that Sharia’h is the strict law in the Sudan,” he said. “The law of Islam is the law of the land.”
    This was—and I could have said this if I had been bold or stupid enough—the exact cause of conflict between the Islamic north and the Christian south, a conflict I’d written about last time I was here. But not this time. I suspected the Eritrean war, far to the southeast in the Ethiopian highlands, would occupy me wholly.
    I said the politest good-night to the Nuba.
    â€œI will burn this damned shirt,” murmured Christine.
    â€œNo, you can store it as Stella Harries’.”
    â€œI bought it for the film festival last year. It didn’t cause any trouble at all in Cannes.”
    In the market the next morning, before we went to the police and Interior offices, I helped Christine buy three khaki shirts, for the Eritreans suggested that color—it did not show up against the ochres of the Eritrean landscape and did not attract the eyes of bomber pilots.
    Christine handled the shirts with the bewildered reverence of a recruit receiving her uniform. A brown shirt buttoned to the neck, with the sleeves buttoned at the wrist or even rolled up one or two turns, did not offend against the Sharia’h . Nor attract the attention of big Nubian cops with khat for sale.
    Since she hardly had any more money than she needed to fly to Port Sudan, I bought her a water bottle, too—she hadn’t thought to bring that particular item with her.
    I enjoyed steering Christine around the town; I was restored to a flush of paternity as we consulted each other over the question of her shirts.
    â€œThey don’t even like short sleeves?” she asked me, astonished in her mute way.
    â€œNot even short sleeves. Only people in temperate zones find it’s decent to flirt with the sun. Here, a bare arm is like a buttock.”
    â€œThat’s ridiculous,” she murmured, but a truck went by and in a second she was brushing dust off the front of her new khaki as if the hedonism of film festivals on the Cote d’Azur were well lost.
    The Eritreans also kept an office in Khartoum. Driving to it, I asked her if she wanted to visit Omdurman later in the day? It was, after all, the city’s chief tourist attraction, the site of the tomb of the Mahdi, the great Sudanese unifier whose Dervishes had captured Khartoum and killed General Gordon a century before. There had then been a great battle over there in Omdurman, where General Kitchener had mown down the Mahdi’s troops.
    As I spoke of Mahdi the Avenger and of the Battle of Omdurman, she looked