To Asmara Read Online Free PDF Page B

at me as if I were naming rock groups too esoteric for a normal, busy girl to take an interest in. To hell with Omdurman! She had come to Africa to see one sight—Masihi the filmmaker.
    An old-fashioned and no doubt racist print of brave General Gordon at the head of a staircase in Khartoum and facing the first of a tide of Dervishes advancing up the stairs with a spear had hung on the walls of one of the number of bush schools I’d gone to in Australia. The memory of it caused me to ask about Christine’s education.
    When I asked, she let me know that she’d been studying graphic arts at some polytechnic near Fontainebleau.
    â€œDo you like it?”
    â€œI would prefer to study film, but that makes my mother nervous. She says filmmakers have no proper life.” The girl shrugged and smiled briefly. “With graphic arts you can make a living and still pretend you’re doing proper, serious work.”
    â€œYou might be able to help your father,” I remarked. But I wasn’t sure whether it was right to start such hopes in her.
    In any case, she didn’t seem to have any unrealistic yearnings. “I can do sound,” she said. “I’ve done sound for some of the students in the film course.”

Tessfaha
    When I first came to London, I was equipped to take Fleet Street or Wapping by storm. I gravitated toward the aid newspapers in Covent Garden. I attended press briefings by prominent African exiles or by African foreign ministers visiting the old imperial capital. After the vast electricity of the Australian sky, England’s low horizon suited me as well as the unchallenging work. I lived poorly in one-room-with-kitchenette in southwest London. Bernadette did not call me. I used half my earnings telephoning Australia, talking to those who now knew where and how she was.
    Having been at one time very nearly, though unofficially, the Times correspondent on matters of remote Australia, I was invited by an adventurous editor to travel to the Sudan, a republic tormented by tribalism, and to write about the civil war in the south. For a time there I traveled with a water drilling crew under the protection of a Sudanese army escort. I sent my stories back from the Akropole in Khartoum. That sprawling, annoying, and engrossing capital delayed me for some time. In the Sudan Club I met Stella Harries, the BBC correspondent in Khartoum.
    Given that the cost of living in Khartoum was so much cheaper than England, I stayed on for some months, operating on the basis of a loose brief from The Times , selling some taped material to Australian and Canadian radio, living in Stella Harries’ villa. She soothed my pride by accepting a token rent. Despite Stella’s urging, I resisted learning Arabic. Stella accused me of behaving as if learning Pitjantjara had been dangerous enough. The loss of Bernadette had made me suspicious of languages.
    I lacked the confidence, too, to set myself up in my own right in the Sudan. At last I headed back to the misty and squalid comforts of England. I took the cheap flights through Saudi Arabia, not the more fashionable British Airways or Austrian Airlines, the ones on which high Sudanese officials flew.
    When, at Stella’s urging, I contacted the Eritrean office in London, to put myself on their mailing list for press releases, I was flattered to find that they knew about me, had read my work in The Times . They sometimes invited me to go with them to an Eritrean restaurant in London.
    On a grim February day earlier this year, after my visit to Colorado, they called me and invited me to meet one of the visiting leaders from “the field,” a man named Tessfaha. They did not comment on Tessfaha’s exact status and function in the Eritrean struggle. They referred to him as “the Colonel,” but I didn’t know whether that was a rank or a nickname. The meeting place was an Eritrean restaurant in Kilburn.
    I’d half