Free To Asmara by Thomas Keneally Page A

head like a middle-aged man who didn’t know if the future should be entrusted to the young.
    â€œShe mightn’t be telling the truth,” I suggested.
    â€œSounds credible to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve seen a lot of her. I mean, over at the clinic.”
    Perhaps he thought he was punishing me by describing the girl’s behavior in the Eritrean clinic. She watched videos of British and American educational television programs with the maimed. She didn’t seem to have a Florence Nightingale complex, said Henry. It was the young Eritreans who looked after her , rather than the opposite. They would scoot off in their wheelchairs and fetch glasses of water for her. He’d seen her working with a musical group—the kirir (a sort of banjo made out of the back of a chair), a thick pipe and a thin pipe both peculiar to the region, and of course the universal instrument of the music of the young, the Japanese keyboard.
    Henry confused me now by becoming suddenly disarming. “She doesn’t seem to want to cry,” he said, “like I do when I go over there. But she likes their company. She’s likeable herself when she’s over there. There’s no womeen’s sec-shyern bullshit from her over there. If you offered to take her legs off tomorrow and put her in a wheelchair beside them, I think she might just go for it.”
    I turned down the light. We lay on our beds. I soon found that Henry wasn’t reconciled to all that had happened tonight.
    â€œIt’s up to her to tell her father, don’t you think? That is, if it’s the truth.”
    â€œI’m not a barbarian,” Henry told me. “Anyhow,” he asked with a frank contempt, something I hadn’t seen in him before, “were you ever married?”
    To my surprise, I said, “Yes.”
    I was surprised afterward that I told him a little, the simplest version: My wife was living with another man.
    Yet sitting on the patio at the villa the next day, I found myself confiding to my tape recorder, the little inbuilt mike close to my lips, some details about Bernadette.
    In my home city, I believe it’s honest to say, friends of Bernadette and mine still use old-fashioned terms like unlucky and ill-fated as they pass on what they know of us and what’s become of us. One thing that’s become of me is that I won’t be able to be reached in Eritrea. I told Bernadette when I met her the last time that she could always reach me if she chose. There was a side of me which considered this a generous offer. In any case, the promise clearly meant little to her but much to me. And it was valid whenever I was in England, or even in Poland and the Sudan, where the newspaper had at various times sent me. It was valid for Colorado while I was there—there were always friends Bernadette knew how to find who could tell her where I could be found.
    But it wouldn’t be true of Eritrea. Eritrea was anything but contactable by the existing technology. There were ways in which Eritrea was not the present. It was the future in terms of the theories—military and revolutionary—which hung in its fiery air. But there was no telephone system. Even if Bernadette made an unlikely appeal to me, the news wouldn’t reach me there. In a world where our most banal inquiries—“Are you missing me?” “What time is it there?” “Has it been hot?” “Has it been cold?” “Has it been wet?” “Has it been dry?”—whistle around the globe in an instant, people cannot wait months for answers any more.
    At the time I graduated as a lawyer, there was a fashion in the law faculty of my university: advocacy on behalf of the Australian indigenous peoples. That is, on behalf of those native Australian tribes which had been lumped together under the classicist’s name, Aborigines —people who’d occupied Australia from