The Shadow of the Sun

Eritrean Scenes

Asmara, five o’clock in the morning. Dark and cool. Suddenly two sounds soar simultaneously over the city: the powerful, low chiming of the bell from the cathedral on Via Independencia and the drawn-out, lilting calls of the muezzin from the mosque nearby. For several minutes these two sounds fill the air, combine and reinforce each other, creating a harmonious and triumphal ecumenical duet that shatters the quiet of the sleepy streets and awakens their inhabitants. The voice of the bell, rising and falling, is like a sonorous accompaniment, a lofty and bracing allegro punctuating the fervent Koranic suras with which the muezzin summons the faithful to the first prayer of the day, called salad as-subh.

Deafened by this morning music, I walk cold and hungry through the empty streets to the bus station: I am planning to go to Massawa today. Even on the large maps of Africa, the distance between Asmara and Massawa is barely the width of a nail, and in reality it is not great, only 110 kilometers, but it takes a bus five hours to traverse it, descending from an altitude of 2,500 meters down to sea level — the Red Sea, along which Massawa lies.

Asmara and Massawa are the principal cities of Eritrea, the youngest African state, with a population of only three million. It had never in the past been an independent state, being first a colony of Turkey, then of Egypt, and in the twentieth century of Italy, England, and Ethiopia successively. In 1962, the latter, having already forcibly occupied Eritrea for ten years, declared it an Ethiopian province, to which the Eritreans responded with an anti-Ethiopian war of liberation, the longest-running war (thirty years) in the history of the continent. When Haile Selassie ruled in Addis Ababa, the Americans helped him fight the Eritreans, and when Mengistu overthrew the emperor and seized power for himself, the Russians did. You can see the relics of this history in the great park in Asmara, where the war museum is situated. Its charming and hospitable young director, Aforki Arefaine, is a poet and guitarist, and a former guerrilla. He first shows me American mortars and guns, and then a collection of Soviet tommy guns, mines, rocket launchers, and MIGs. “This is nothing!” he says. “If only you could see Debre Zeyit!”

It wasn’t easy, because securing permission is complicated, but I finally did see Debre Zeyit. It is several dozen kilometers outside Addis Ababa. You drive along country roads, passing a series of military checkpoints. At the last one, the soldiers open the gate to a large enclosure at the top of a flat hill. The view from this place is unlike any in the world. Before us, as far as the eye can see, all the way to the distant, misty horizon, lies a flat and treeless plain — and it is completely covered with military equipment. To one side, stretching for kilometers, are fields of artillery pieces of various calibers: unending avenues of medium and large tanks; enclosures stacked with a veritable forest of antiaircraft guns and mortars; hundreds upon hundreds of armored trucks, small tanks, motorized radio stations, amphibious vehicles. And on the other side stand enormous hangars and warehouses, the hangars full of the body parts of still unassembled MIGs, the warehouses brimming with crates of ammunition and mines.

What’s most shocking and astonishing is the monstrous quantity of everything, the improbable accumulation, the piles of hundreds of thousands of machine guns, mountainous-terrain howitzers, military helicopters. All of this wended its way for years by sea from the Soviet Union to Ethiopia, Brezhnev’s gift to Mengistu. Not even a tenth of these armaments could actually be operated by people in Ethiopia. Why, with this many tanks, you could conquer all of Africa, and with fire from all these guns and rocket launchers reduce the continent to ashes! Roaming through the still streets of this city of motionless steel, where dark, rusty barrels stared at me from everywhere and around whose every corner caterpillar tanks bared their massive metal teeth, I thought about the man who, dreaming of conquering Africa, of staging on this continent a showpiece blitzkrieg, constructed this military necropolis. Who could this have been? Moscow’s ambassador to Addis Ababa? Marshal Ustinov? Brezhnev himself?

“And did you see Tira Avolo?” Aforki asked me once. Yes, I saw Tira Avolo. It is one of the wonders of the world. Asmara is a beautiful city, with an Italian, Mediterranean architecture and a delectable climate — an eternal warm and sunny spring. Tira Avolo is Asmara’s luxurious residential neighborhood. Magnificent villas submerged in flowering gardens, royal palms, tall hedges, swimming pools, lush lawns and decorative borders, an inexhaustible parade of plants, colors, and scents — a veritable paradise on earth. When the Italians left Asmara in the course of the war, Tira Avolo was taken over by Ethiopian and Soviet generals. No Sochi, Sukhumi, or Gagra can rival Tira Avolo in climate and comfort. So half the High Command of the Red Army, having been forbidden access to the Côte d’Azur or Capri, spent their holidays in Asmara, simultaneously helping Mengistu’s forces fight the Eritrean guerrillas.

The Ethiopian army regularly used napalm. To protect themselves, the Eritreans dug shelters, camouflaged corridors, and secret hiding places. With time, they had constructed a second, underground country — literally underground, a clandestine, covert Eritrea, impenetrable to strangers, which they could traverse from one point to another undetected by the enemy. The Eritrean war, they themselves proudly emphasize, was no bush war, no destructive and wasteful spasm of plunder whipped up by warlords. In their underground state they had schools and hospitals, courts and orphanages, workshops and gunsmiths. In a country of illiterates, each warrior had to know how to read and write.

The Eritreans’ pride and achievement is now their problem and their drama. The war ended in 1991, two years later Eritrea became an independent nation, and now this small country, one of the poorest in the world, has a hundred-thousand-strong army of young, relatively well-educated people it doesn’t know what to do with. Eritrea has no industry, agriculture is devastated, the towns are in ruin, the roads wrecked. One hundred thousand soldiers awake each morning with nothing to do; most important, they have nothing to eat. And it’s not just the soldiers. The fate of their civilian friends and brothers is similar. All you have to do is walk through the streets of Asmara during dinnertime. The officials of the fledgling nation’s few institutions are hurrying to little neighborhood restaurants and bars for a bite to eat. But the crowds of young people have nowhere to go — they don’t work and are penniless. They walk around, peer into shop windows, stand on street corners, recline on benches — idle and hungry.

The bells of the cathedral fall silent, the muezzin’s voice ceases calling, a fiery, blinding sun emerges from behind the mountains of Yemen, and our bus — an ancient Fiat whose body has been so corroded by rust and so often knocked and hammered that it is impossible to determine its color — sets off, rushing downhill past steep little fields from 2,500 meters above the sea. I can scarcely bring myself to describe this journey. The chauffeur seats me, the only European, next to him. He is a young, intelligent, and careful driver. He understands this road, knows its deadly traps. There are several hundred turns along the one-hundred-kilometer route — in fact, the entire road is just turns and bends, and, moreover, the narrow track, which is covered with loose gravel, runs the entire time above formidable precipices, without any protective railings or safeguards.

At many a turn, if you don’t suffer from fear of heights, you can look down and see lying far, far below you, at the bottom of the chasm, the shattered remains of buses, trucks, armored vehicles, and the skeletons of all sorts of beasts — probably camels, perhaps mules or donkeys. Some are already very old, but others — and it is those that are most disturbing — are quite fresh. The driver and his passengers are in sync, clearly a well-practiced and smoothly functioning team: when we enter a turn, the driver calls out a protracted “Yyyaaahhh!” and at this signal the passengers lean in the opposite direction, giving the bus the counterweight it needs to keep from plunging headlong into the abyss.

Every now and then we come upon a brightly colored Coptic altar at a bend, decorated with ribbons, artificial puffy flowers, and naively painted icons, with several skinny, desiccated monks milling about. When the bus slows down on the turn, they hold clay bowls up to the windows, into which the passengers can throw offerings of some pennies. The monks will pray for their safe journey — safe at least until the next bend.

Every kilometer reveals different vistas, a different landscape emerges from behind each mountain; ever new panormas compose themselves before our eyes, the earth showing off the abundance of its charms, wanting to overwhelm us with its beauty. Because, indeed, this road is at once terrifying and beautiful. Down below, a village submerged in flowering shrubs; there, a monastery, its pale walls shining against the black of the mountains like a white flame. Over there, a gigantic, one-hundred-ton boulder, split in half as neatly as if by a thunderbolt — and thrust into the middle of a green pasture. Somewhere else, fields of loose stones, sparsely, carelessly scattered about — but in a certain spot these stones are more concentrated, lie nearer one another, nearer and neater: the sign of a Muslim cemetery. Here, as in a classical landscape painting, a rapid stream glitters with silver; over there, massed cliffs create heaven-grazing gates, convoluted labyrinths, immense columns.

As we descend lower and lower, constantly spinning around on the frenzied carousel of turns, ever balancing on the border between life and death, we feel it getting warmer, and then very warm, even hot, until finally, as though we’d been tossed with a giant shovel, we are thrust into a blazing furnace — Massawa.

First, though, several kilometers before the city, the mountains end and the road runs straight and level. At this point, the driver is transformed: his slim silhouette goes limp, his facial muscles relax, and his expression becomes gentler. He smiles. He reaches for a stack of cassettes lying next to him and snaps one into the tape player. From the scratched, gravelly recording comes the hoarse voice of a local singer. The melody is Eastern; there are many high, yearning, sentimental tones in it. “He is saying that she has eyes like two moons,” the driver explains to me. “And that he loves those moonlike eyes.”

We enter the ruined city. On either side of the road, mountains of artillery shells. The walls of burned houses, and broken, splintered tree trunks. A woman is walking down an empty street, two boys are playing in the cab of a demolished truck. We arrive at a sandy rectangular square in the center of town. All around, shabby single-story houses painted green, pink, and yellow, the façades cracked, the paint peeling and falling. In one corner, in a spot of shade, three old men are napping. They are sitting on the ground, their turbans pulled down over their eyes.

Eritrea is two altitudes, two climates, two religions. In the highlands, where Asmara lies and where it is cooler, lives the Tigrinya ethnic group. The majority of the country’s inhabitants belong to it. The Tigrinya are Coptic Christians. The other part of Eritrea is the hot, semidesert lowlands — the shores of the Red Sea, between Sudan and Djibouti. Various pastoral people live there, professing Islam (Christianity seems to tolerate the tropics less well, while Islam takes to them). Massawa, the port and the city, belong to that latter world. These areas of the Red Sea around Massawa and Assab, and on the Gulf of Aden at Djibouti, Aden, and Berbera, are the hottest spots on the planet. As I stepped off the bus, I was struck by such heat that I could barely catch my breath. I felt that the flaming air all around would soon choke me, and I realized I had to find shelter quickly because in a moment I would collapse. I began to scrutinize the lifeless town, searching for some hint, some trace of life. Seeing no signs anywhere, in despair I simply started walking straight ahead. I knew I wouldn’t get far, but kept going, with great difficulty, lifting one leg, then the other, as if I were pulling them out of a bottomless, sucking quagmire. At long last I spotted a bar, its entrance shielded by a percale curtain. I parted the panels of fabric, walked in, and slumped on the nearest bench. My ears were buzzing; the heat seemed to be growing more intense, more abominable.

In the darkness, at the back of the empty bar, I noticed a dirt-encrusted, battered counter and two heads lying on it. From a distance, it appeared the heads had been severed, and left here by someone. Yes. That’s what must have happened, because the heads were not moving. They were showing no signs of life whatsoever. But I was in no condition to ponder who might have brought these heads here and why he would have left them. My attention was diverted by the sight of a crate of water bottles next to the counter. With what strength I had left I dragged myself over to them and began drinking, bottle after bottle. Only then did one of the heads open an eye, which proceeded to observe what I was doing. But the two barmaids still did not so much as twitch, motionless from the heat, like lizards.

Having water and a shady place, I now calmly waited for the fierce afternoon hours to pass. Later, I ventured out to search for some sort of a hotel. One could see that the wealthy districts of Massawa must once have been an enchanting mixture of tropical, Italianate-Arabic architecture. But now, several years after the war, most of the houses still lay in ruins, and the sidewalks were littered with bricks, garbage, and glass. In one of the city’s main intersections stood an enormous burned-out Russian T-72 tank. They clearly had no means of removing it. There wasn’t a crane in Eritrea capable of lifting it, no platform on which it could be transported, no forge that could melt it down. Indeed, you can bring a great tank like this into a country like Eritrea, you can fire away with it, but when it breaks down, or someone torches it, there is really nothing to be done with the wreckage.