To Asmara: A Novel of Africa by Keneally Thomas

Author:Keneally, Thomas [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, War, Travel, Adult
ISBN: 9781504026734
Goodreads: 27424736
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1989-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Editor’s Interjection: Recruiting Fida

We are forced to interrupt Darcy’s account to explain Fida’s absence from She’b. There is a need, too, to clarify the arrangement achieved between Colonel Tessfaha, the Eritrean intelligence officer, and Major Fida, prisoner of war and ejected MIG pilot, and to see how Fida became involved in a course parallel to the one Darcy committed himself to.

Tessfaha’s approach to both men was a little out of character for the Eritreans. In their quarter of a century or more of war against the Ethiopians, these rebels had never begged much of foreign powers. At one stage they were believed to have approached the Americans and indicated that as a people subject to bombing they would appreciate Stinger ground-to-air missiles. But if so, the Americans didn’t oblige. Nor would the EPLF have shown much surprise at America’s rebuff. Perhaps they were not willing to give enough in return.

In any case, it was a rare occasion when the Eritreans asked outside people for help, apart, of course, from the obvious mercies of grain and cheese and powdered milk.

Colonel Tessfaha must therefore have won some argument among the Eritrean military leadership—an argument which took account of and paid reverence to the Eritrean dogma of nonalignment—and on the basis of that successful appeal, been enabled to approach both foreigners, Major Fida and the Western journalist Timothy Darcy.

On the afternoon of his recruitment, Major Paulos Fida—according to his own taped account to Stella—sat listening to the BBC African news in his bunker in the She’b officers’ camp. On a packing-case table in the middle of the bunker sat his bunker mate’s, Captain Berezhani’s, shortwave radio. Berezhani had been captured together with the radio at the great slaughter of Mersa Teklai, which had left, within the space of little more than twenty-four hours, the bare Red Sea plains of the Sahel strewn with the corpses of four thousand Ethiopian tankmen.

Fida thought it very civilized of the Eritreans to let Berezhani keep his radio. For they themselves were so short of them. In the mountains they had a workshop where shortwave radios captured from Ethiopian soldiers were repaired and then distributed throughout the Eritrean population. They ran a similar workshop near the first one, where they repaired watches, alarm clocks, and the large Russian wall clocks which ordinary Ethiopian soldiers lugged to the front with them as if such an item, the edges of the face glass often frosted and etched with scenes from Russian winters, were essential for the peasant conscript going into battle.

In any case the Eritreans, whose officers did not wear any badges of rank themselves or seem to the outsider to assume any privileges, let Berezhani keep his shortwave and his alarm clock because he was a company commander. Both possessions were great supports to him and his fellow prisoner, Major Paulos Fida, who, having ejected from his plane, had brought no possessions with him into captivity.

Captain Berezhani listened to the daily African news in English with all the pent-up hope of a gambler waiting for an unlikely number to come up.

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