To Asmara by Thomas Keneally

luggage.”
    We groaned. Tecleh was arguing strenuously, but I could not understand what he was saying. Henry said to me, “He’s not opening my luggage! You know what it is? He wants to have Christine around for a few hours to look at. Probably hasn’t seen a European woman for years, if ever. I know it’s lonely on the frontier, but for Christ’s sake …”
    He patted the colorful mountaineer’s belt-cum-wallet which hung around his waist. He caught up to the sergeant, who was already in the doorway. Beyond the opened door I could see a table with a radio-transmitter, and a suit of lime green pajamas hanging from a rafter. The sergeant had some style!
    Henry spoke in a low voice to the sergeant. In contrast to last night, Henry seemed to be operating smoothly; I was sure he would bring the sergeant around. Occasionally the honorific effendi could be heard, and the rasp of the zipper on Henry’s belt. There was a flash also of highly colored Sudanese pounds.
    After more talk, the sergeant turned to us, hitting the Sudanese pounds from Henry’s hand onto the ground. “I am a Muslim,” he cried. “I am not as dishonest as Christians!”
    â€œAi-ai-ai!” cried Tecleh.
    â€œYou are from everywhere. France, the United States, the last places on earth! How do I know what you are taking to my friends the Eritreans?”
    There wasn’t any doubting his professional affront. Yet the Sudan was a place where official venality was a tradition, so Henry’s assumption that he needed paying off hadn’t been unrealistic. Nonetheless, Henry was scrabbling now on the ground for the Sudanese pounds he’d offered the sergeant.
    And what this rejection of Henry’s offer meant was hard to gauge. Did the Eritreans use the sergeant to process their foreign visitors? It would accord with their idea of politeness. Was he a just man? Did that account for his being here in the last of towns? Or did he so long to spend an hour with Christine’s pale European presence that the longing surpassed money considerations?
    Behind him now Henry waved the notes in the air, as if offering them to the world. There were no takers though. The sergeant frowned at the girl. “Then it is for just the one month,” he told her. “Some people stay longer, some for very long times. But unless I can radio, you are not permitted to remain beyond a month.”
    She gave the same kind of dangerous, negligent shrug I seemed to remember her giving the night the Norwegian officers told her she could not think of sleeping in the May Gardens. She didn’t know if she’d stay in Eritrea for a week or forever. You couldn’t tell if she was going to punish or honor her father, or both, or for how long. But obviously it wouldn’t depend on a Sudanese permit.
    â€œWe have a green cell inside,” the sergeant told us all. “You would not like the green cell. It is very hot. When you come out of the south, you must speak to me again.”
    From an iron bedstead and palliasse standing on the same shady side of the hut as the fire, he fetched an accounts book, a rubber stamp, and an ink pad. Our names were copied from each permit into the accounts book, the dates were filled in. The sergeant consulted his watch at great length, frowning as if he wondered whether it was reliable, and then wrote the time down in Roman numerals. He was a man of some education.
    Back at the truck the barefoot doctors were changing a colostomy bag on the paraplegic. They covered him with a shawl. I listened as the patient spoke delicately to his nurses in Tigrinyan.

Sorghum — A Gift
    Perhaps an hour later, south of the so-called border post and while we were still within the Sudan, the Sahara ended. We entered subtler, rockier country, the beginnings of Africa’s acacias. The sun fell and trees grew abruptly taller. I could see the black shapes of aid trucks in the shadows of