To Asmara by Thomas Keneally Page B

That’s—according to reliable report—their main source.”
    Henry laughed as if at innocence.
    â€œGod, you’re such a smug bastard. A hard man to share a goddam desert with. No wonder your wife cleared out!”
    I felt an anger that actually transcended the desire to hit him. It was an anger at myself for having mentioned Bernadette to him that night up the coast, in the guest house at Port Sudan. Until I escaped him and went to witness the ambush beyond the front line, he could harry me all the way through Eritrea with my wife’s name. He hadn’t needed to hear it, I hadn’t needed to utter it. Yet I’d paid it out freely to him.
    â€œThat’s the lowest bloody card to play,” I told him.
    â€œI suppose it is,” he admitted, suddenly and erratically the disarming midwest boy again.
    â€œMy source argues,” I persisted, “that they’re capturing so much Russian equipment from the Ethiopians that if it were known in Moscow to more than a few self-serving bureaucrats, it could …”
    â€œWhat d’you say? Bring the Russian government down?”
    And he chuckled again.
    â€œI think you ought at least suspend judgment,” I said irrationally, “till you’ve seen the bloody place.”
    â€œIn Africa,” he advised me in an enraging big-brother sort of way, “you don’t get any marks for going sentimental on people.”
    Worse still, he seemed to think this was a great aphorism.
    â€œA hard man to share a goddam desert with,” Henry had said randomly. But like many random insults it struck accurately. Because once, in Fryer River, that had been my exact conceit. I’d thought I was a wonderful man for deserts; I’d thought I had a gift for them, for the massive and complicated stretches of earth and the rivers in which no visible water ran. Returning to the area around the Kurburaka cookhouse, I seemed to experience the dry, fiery redolence of Fryer River, and I was translated there again, under the same moon, fatally determined to see Bernadette’s absolutely untypical Fryer River misery as a phase, a fit, a pet, a chemical spasm, a spate of ego.
    The intimate flavor of her unhappiness returned to me there in Kurburaka. Yet I hadn’t acknowledged it at the time. Friends of ours, visitors to Fryer River, found themselves sitting through our arguments, which they noticed more acutely than I did. My line was that this was the competent, black-sweatered social worker Bernadette Yang, star of the Legal Service. She must know the tribal women would change as she got closer to them, that she would ovecome what I chose to call “their shyness,” that they’d greet her in sisterhood in the end.
    One old friend said later that both of us knew what the truth was but were forbidden by our ideas of orthodoxy and heresy from stating it. The easy racist/nonracist division of humanity, which we’d used as a tool in our youth, a sort of adjustable spanner of debate in our work for city Aborigines, wasn’t of any use to us here. The clear truth was that both the tribal men and the tribal women did not want her to be Chinese. They had known Europeans close up for only a few generations and had come to accept them as priests of a world scheme mysterious yet parallel to their own. Someone Chinese did not fit this parallel system. The question was: Where was her authority?
    Those tribal people who went to Alice Springs knew that the few Chinese there lived on the fringe. So what did Bernadette Yang have to give the Fryer River population; what power could she exercise in the world’s mechanics?
    Bernadette wanted me to admit all this now, to admit that in Fryer River she was not so much a pariah as someone who lacked a place. It’s very likely an admission would have been enough to satisfy her. But out of some strange, naive loyalty to the tribal council, the source of my most wonderful