The Book of Science and Antiquities: A Novel by Keneally Thomas

Author:Keneally, Thomas [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction, Historical, Fiction, Australia, Anthropology
ISBN: 9781982121051
Goodreads: 44150438
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2018-11-01T07:00:00+00:00

Welcoming the Camel

EVEN BEFORE TED’S death, I had returned to Eritrea to make another documentary, this time about the war and the sort of society the Eritreans seemed to be forming. It had been commissioned and fully funded as an Australian and British coproduction. The film company was supplying a crew and equipment. My relationship with the cameraman was to be somewhat similar to the one I’d had with Andy long before: I would shoot my own footage, and so would he, though I was director of the overall film.

Drawn by Ted and my stories, along with Ted’s barely scientific suspicion that the Eritreans might be reacting to a surge in the human brain, Cath wanted to come to Eritrea with me. By that stage Ted had traveled to Eritrea once more to visit Freselam and the teams and make plans for the lens facility. Cath and I measured up the perils, including the risks of orphaning our daughters. We consulted them. And then—rightly or wrongly, and with their blessing, and faith in Eritrean protection—we went. Underneath our motives lay the Ted-implanted suspicion we might be visiting something transcendent, a shift in the human tale. The bold surmise! Was I amongst the new humans here?

The ongoing war revealed itself in Orotta in the bloodless faces of young boys and girls taken down or partially dismembered by a variety of weaponry including 88-millimeter guns. In the women who gave premature birth from shock during extreme bombardments, and their slivers of babies who might or might not become viable. In the amputees and those whose faces were slashed off. In the somnolent malaria sufferers, and the smiling orphans without any arms or legs. In the unexploded cluster bombs Mengistu denied using.

After leaving Orotta, we made for the newly captured town of Afabet, which was further than a person could have got when I first came to Eritrea at Ted’s urging. On the way our truck broke down near what had been the frontline town of Nacfa, where every house was ruined and tumbled by bombing and artillery. We spent two nights in this town, living in a deep bunker, sharing its rear sleeping chamber with the camera crew. Stacey, the cameraman, was at the far end; Cath nearest the door; the rest of us in between. Lying behind Cath’s head was a pile of cluster bomb fragments that Cath had collected with the intention of taking them home to give to a particular senator who could, in turn, show them to Mengistu’s foreign minister when that official visited Canberra. They seemed emblematic of Cath’s resolve, in this chamber where none of us could get to sleep after discussing the journey thus far, the shock of it, all the medical skills of Orotta.

Cath and I had the capacity, as if to seal our suspicions about events, for a deeper discourse, the comfort of caresses. But we could not engage in them in the crowded bunker, given that the camera crew was around us, and our Eritrean minders, drivers, soldiers on the move were occupying the front chamber.

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