To Asmara by Thomas Keneally Page A

these loftier thorn bushes and eucalypts. This was the oasis I’d heard of, Kurburaka.
    Tecleh braked and called, “Ai-ai-ai! Here we eat some injera .”
    The barefoot doctors gave the paraplegic an injection, while all the time he spoke softly to them, the patient comforting the physicians. We were led away between trees and into a clearing, to an open-sided hut of clay, clay platforms spread with rugs sofa-like inside it. Some Eritrean drivers were eating here. Others slept, each completely enclosed in his shroudlike cloak.
    Lanterns were burning in a square mud brick kitchen, and from inside the earthen oven flashed as the cooks lifted injera bread, a kind of immense, flat pancake, off its metal shaping domes. Tecleh pushed us toward a platform in the hut, and soon a plate appeared in front of us, a vast tin dish covered with the brownish bread, a pile of peppers and lentils heaped in the middle. Tecleh tore out a triangular wad of soft pancake and used it to scoop up lentils and peppers. Chewing a mouthful in an exaggerated way, he uttered patriotic gasps and groans of pleasure.
    Henry cast his eyes upward at all this overacting. “It tastes like goddam crepes made out of tears,” he muttered. “We need to remember to shit before we go.” He was eating with his mouth open to let out the heat of the peppers. “This stuff is instant arousal to the average Western bowel.”
    Henry was accurate. After we’d finished eating, Christine came to me and asked me matter-of-factly but with old-fashioned delicacy if I had tissue paper. In with the recklessness which had brought her here and which sometimes surfaced in her answers to Sudanese officials, there was something staid. You could imagine her face beneath the black hat of a church-going French spinster. And another thing: She didn’t use much slang. Perhaps her mother had protected her from movies and television, given the impact these things had had in her own life.
    Like a gratified parent anyhow, I went to my kit and tore off an excessive wad of the stuff for her. Henry and I then set off out through the perimeter of supply trucks to the farthest rim of the oasis. We stepped carefully. This was the acre assigned for the comfort of truck drivers.
    The moon had brilliantly risen. I could see every nuance of Henry’s smile when we remet. We began to stroll back toward the flicker of kerosene lamps, the robust surge of flame from the injera oven. While we were still far from all that, though, Henry swung himself up on the rear bumper bar of a truck. He wrestled with the dust-thickened tarpaulin, loosened it, and peered inside at the cargo. He took out a pocket torch and shone it. Even from ground level I could see sacks marked Sorghum — A Gift of the People of the United States .
    â€œSorghum,” Henry improvised with a grin, “a gift from the Department of Agriculture, who can’t give the stuff away!”
    Then he readjusted the cover and switched off the torch.
    â€œI just thought I might stumble on a shipment of another form of aid. Assault rifles, for example. Gift of the PLO.”
    I felt in a not quite rational way that Henry was betraying the trust of his hosts. I wanted to put him in his place—a strange urge for a supposed journalist when faced with a good rumor.
    â€œA friend of mine,” I said, “an English correspondent in Khartoum, has looked into all that. According to her, it’s a myth. The West says, ‘The PLO supports them.’ The idea is that the West can then forget about them. That’s my friend’s thesis. And she’s nobody’s fool.”
    Henry gave a hard-bitten roll of the eyes. “They’ve been fighting for a quarter of a century. Who do you think does supply them, friend?”
    â€œThey’re fighting the Ethiopians,” I said. “The biggest army in Africa, perhaps the best supplied, and one they have consistently defeated.