Free To Asmara by Thomas Keneally

soul,” he told us. “We have not fought for a quarter of a century to be happy with Malesh .”
    Suddenly, Christine had taken hold of my hand. It didn’t worry the guest house manager—in Africa the holding of hands is a far less sexual gesture than it probably is in the West. I knew there was no desire there and suspected she was claiming me the way a girl does who shows tenderness to A to frighten B off. But who was B? Henry hadn’t given any sign of pushing himself at Christine.
    â€œWhat does this mean?” I couldn’t stop myself asking in a low voice. But the question might have sounded to Henry like a smug rhetorical one, from the man who has been admitted into possession. Christine did not answer it. I thought I saw a strange, angry flicker of Henry’s eyebrows.
    We drank sweet tea at the Red Sea Hotel in an environment of mosquitos, and Henry and the veteran discussed their brushes with that fever. But there was an edge of grim boast to Henry’s voice now.
    The veteran-manager did not seem to notice it. “I get malaria because of my wounds,” he told us, looking up at the old photographs on the walls, snaps of British women, wives of officers, resting in oases between legs of journeys.
    The man wasn’t going to state what those wounds were. When everyone had their scars, it was taken as ungracious to speak about that except in objective terms. For they wanted you to know they had been wounded, but they didn’t want to talk about it in the Western subjective way. So, no reminiscences of shock, of awakening from anesthesia, of what the doctor said, of how it felt !
    Back at the villa afterward, I was hunched on my bed beneath the fans when Henry came in, picked up his packed and aged diary-journal and the sketch pad in which he had been sketching some of the Eritreans in the guest house, and made room for himself to sit on his own bed.
    â€œWell,” he said confidingly. “We know what the trouble with Mademoiselle Malmédy is now!”
    â€œTrouble?” I asked him.
    â€œYou know what I mean. How spaced out the kid is!”
    I wondered if his idea of spaced out covered also her grabbing my hand during the promenade through Port Sudan.
    â€œSeems she’s had an abortion,” he told me. “Last month in Paris.”
    I disliked above all the adolescent lack of finesse in Henry, the way he conveyed the gossip, diminishing himself, diminishing the enthusiastic prosthetic-garage conversationalist and closer of plane hatches that he’d been until now. Just the same, it struck me that here was an explanation for the girl’s fey detachment toward nearly everything but finding her father.
    Next I began to wonder how this information of Henry’s was got? Henry didn’t seem embarrassed to have it. But, after the sweet fish flesh and the tea, and the false signal of Christine clasping my hand, could he have been driven up to the roof to make a frantic try for the girl? And could Christine have then passed on the news of the abortion as a sort of rebuff, a curse on all men?
    Anyhow, I couldn’t stop myself asking, “How do you know?”
    â€œI went up on the roof to check things out. She and Bufta sleep up there. For the cool, you know. I walked in on Bufta braiding her hair by kerosene lamp, and you’d think I’d walked into a ladies’ room somewhere. Bufta gathered up all her combs and covered her head with a shawl. And the girl wasn’t very friendly. Thees ees the womeen’s sec-shyern , the little mam’selle told me. I told her I hadn’t heard the roof was off-limits and asked her why she was hostile, and she came out with this! She yelled it. Why sherd I want to see murn when becurse of wurn I hev hed an abur-shurn?”
    I didn’t like his mimicry. Nor the way that, having a few seconds before seemed like a high school boy loosely giving away a girl’s secrets, he now shook his