Then, the plastic container appeared. A miracle! A revolution! First of all, it is relatively inexpensive (although in certain houses it is the only thing of any value): it costs around two dollars. Most important, however, it is light. And it comes in various sizes, so even a small child can fetch several liters of water.
All the children carry water. You see entire flocks of youngsters, playing and teasing one another as they walk to a distant spring. What a relief this is for the exhausted African woman! What a transformation in her life! How much more time she now has for herself, for her household!
The plastic container possesses countless advantages. Among the most important is that it holds your place in line. Often, you have to stand for days in a line for water (in those places, that is, where it is delivered by truck). Standing in the tropical sun is torture. It used to be that you couldn’t just set down the clay pot and go sit in the shade: it was too valuable to risk its being stolen. Now, however, you place your plastic container in the line and then go find yourself some shade, or go to the market, or visit friends. Driving through Africa, one sees these kilometer-long, colorful rows awaiting the arrival of water.
More about the children. It is enough to stop briefly in a village, a town, or simply in a field — a group of children will instantly materialize. All of them indescribably tattered. Little shirts, pants — all frayed and shredded beyond belief. Their entire treasure, their sole nourishment, is a small calabash with a bit of water in it. Each piece of bread or banana will disappear, inhaled, in a fraction of a second. Hunger for these children is something permanent, a way of life, second nature. And yet they do not ask for bread or fruit, or even for money.
They ask for a pencil.
A mechanical pencil. The price? Ten cents. Yes, but where can they possibly get ten cents?
They would all like to go to school, they would like to learn. And sometimes they do go to school (a village school is simply a spot in the shade of an enormous mango tree), but they cannot learn to write because they have nothing to write with — they do not own a pencil.
Somewhere near Gondar (you will come to this town of Ethiopian kings and emperors by traveling from the Gulf of Aden through Djibouti in the direction of Al-Ubayyid, Tersaf, N’Djamena, and Lake Chad), I met a man who was walking south. That is really the most important thing one can say about him: that he was walking north to south. Oh, yes, and that he was searching for his brother.
He was barefoot, dressed in short, patched-up pants, and on his back he had something that might have been called a shirt once. Besides that, he had three things: a wanderer’s walking stick; a piece of cloth, which in the morning served him as a towel, shielded his head during the afternoon heat, and at night covered his body while he slept; and, slung over his shoulder, a wooden water dish. He had no money. If people along the way gave him something to eat, he would eat; if they did not, he walked hungry. But he had been hungry his whole life; there was nothing extraordinary about hunger.
He was walking south, because his brother had once set out from home in a southerly direction. When was this? Long ago. (I was speaking with him through the driver, who knew scant English, and had only one expression at his disposal for referring to the past: long ago.) And he has been walking a long time, from somewhere in the Eritrean mountains, from near Keren.
He knows about walking south: in the morning, you must head straight into the sun. When he meets someone, he asks whether they have seen, or know, Solomon (that’s his brother’s name). No one is surprised at such a question. All of Africa is in motion, on the road to somewhere, wandering. Some are running away from war, others from drought, still others from hunger. They are fleeing, straying, getting lost. This one, walking north to south, is an anonymous drop in the human deluge flooding the roads of the continent, a deluge driven either by fear of death or by the hope of finding a place under the sun.
Why does he want to find his brother? Why? He doesn’t understand the question. The reason is obvious, self-evident, not requiring an explanation. He shrugs his shoulders. It is possible that he feels pity for the man he has just encountered and who, though well dressed, is poorer than he in some important, priceless way.
Does he know where he is? Does he know that the place we are sitting is no longer Eritrea, but already Ethiopia, another country? He smiles the smile of a man who knows many things, or who, in any event, knows one thing: that for him there are no boundaries here in Africa, and no states — there is only the burned earth, on which brother seeks brother.
Near this same road — but one must walk down, deep into a nearly impenetrable cleft between two steep mountain slopes — lies the monastery of Debre Libanos. Inside, the church is dark and cool. After hours of driving in blinding sun, the eyes must adjust to this place, which at first impression seems submerged in total darkness. After a time you begin to discern frescoes on the walls, and see Ethiopian pilgrims dressed in white lying facedown on the mat-covered floor. In one corner an old monk is chanting a psalm in a drowsy voice, which periodically dies away altogether, in the already dead language of Ge’ez. In this atmosphere replete with a concentrated and quiet mysticism, everything seems beyond time; beyond measure and weight, beyond life.
Who knows how long these pilgrims lay there, for I walked in and out of the church several times in the course of that day, and each time they were still resting motionless on the mats.
All day? A month? A year? Eternity?
The Cooling Hell
The pilots have not yet turned off the engines, and already people are rushing toward the airplane. Steps are pulled up. We walk down and fall straight into a panting, yelling crowd, which has now reached the plane and is shoving, grabbing at our shirts, pushing at us with all its might: “Passport? Passport?” insistent voices are barking. And immediately after, in the same threatening tone: “Return ticket?” And still others, sharply: “Vaccination? Vaccination?” These demands, this attack, are so violent and disorienting that, shoved, asphyxiated, pawed at, I start to commit error upon error. Asked about my passport, I obediently take it out of my bag. Instantly, someone rips it out of my hands and vanishes. Hectored about a return ticket, I show that I have it. A second later, it, too, is gone. The same thing with my record of vaccinations: someone pulled the form out of my hand and evaporated. I was left with no documents! What do I do now? To whom should I complain? To whom should I appeal? The crowd that had accosted me has suddenly dispersed and disappeared. I am left all alone. A few minutes later, two young men approach. They introduce themselves: “Zado and John. We will protect you. Without us, you will perish.”
I didn’t ask any questions. All I could think was: how terribly hot it is here! It was early afternoon, the air so humid and heavy, thick, burning, that I couldn’t breathe. If only I could leave here, get to a place with a smidgen of coolness! “Where are my documents!” I started to shout, irritated, despairing. I was beginning to lose control; in heat like this you become nervous, enraged, aggressive. “Try to calm down,” said John, when we got into his car, which was parked in front of the airport building. “Soon you will understand everything.”