‘I just wanted to show you,’ he said. ‘Look what they gave me.’ He held a rifle, and a pistol.
She knew why he had been given these things. A son from a previous union had joined an anti-government cell, then thought better of it and run away; in fact Yetemegnu had helped him run away, telling him to leave the city, even putting him on a bus. The other cell-members had come for his father then, and threatened to kill him unless he gave up his son. Alemitu’s partner refused, and went to the authorities to ask for protection, which they said they could not provide. But they had handed him these guns. Don’t show them to a single person! she had said to him. Wrap the big gun up and hide it under your bed. Make sure no one sees the pistol, but hold it close. Then if they come to kill you, you can take at least one of them down with you. She looked at his fearful face. Don’t show anyone, do you hear me?
When, within the month, the local association defence squads came searching for arms, banging on doors to seize weapons which, in many cases, people had always owned, weapons of Italian vintage, even some, older, once hidden from Italians conducting similar searches; weapons kept as naturally as one would a seasoned walking stick or a fattening sheep, for self-defence or just as evidence of being someone who counted, she handed them her own little Colt. A few days later she went into the municipal offices and, shaking, asked for it back. I am a woman all alone, she said to the soldier behind the desk – everything, it seemed, being run by soldiers now. I want to protect myself against thieves. But he was unmoved.
Arms seizures became seizures of anything ‘counter-revolutionary’: printing materials, cameras, building materials, petrol, typewriters, food stores – and of anyone who, in a much-repeated mordant précis of Mengistu’s wild speech, ‘dared to think, or encouraged others to think’. Or, in fact, of anyone with whom the defence squads personally disagreed. The lists in the papers, of the supposedly counter-revolutionary dead, were no longer of names, just numbers. The revolutionary fire flamed bright and hot, pitiless and undiscerning. On May Day thousands of students marched in protest against the public’s disenfranchisement. They were massacred. Those who fled were overtaken and consumed, shot as they ran, shot where they hid, shot in their homes and their safe houses. Parents were required to pay for bullets lodged in their children’s bodies before they could take them away to bury them. The unclaimed and the yet to be identified lay in the streets where they fell and the hyenas came down from the hills and feasted on them. May the Red Terror spread far and wide, said Mengistu, and the Red Terror obliged.
The Red Terror came to visit her, running and stumbling down the hill into the stalls of the Saturday market in the form of a teenager taught by anti-government cells to shoot and to kill. He had missed a target, grazing only an ear, so now he was running, scattering stones, slipping on straw and donkey dung, chased by a gathering mob shouting ‘Get him! Get him!’ And then they did get him, someone taking a stick and aiming a great blow at the teenager’s waist, another at his head, splitting it open. And then the anti-government cells came looking for his killers, and soldiers came looking for the anti-government cells, and in the mêlée those who had been watching Alemitu’s partner saw their chance: a man he knew slightly, a relative, came up to him to give him a hug, and while he was thus distracted, the relative’s accomplice shot him.
She was having her hair buttered and braided for Epiphany, incense was burning and the coffee boiling when they took her into the back room to sit her down and tell her, but she had hardly been able to absorb the news when the square in front of the houses was swarming with men and guns. ‘Bring them out! Bring them out or there’ll be trouble!’ But everyone had shut their doors, their gates, their compounds and sat shaking and silent inside.
‘Bring them out!’ A crash, and two men were standing in her living room and a gun was pointing at her. One of the men swung his leg and kicked over the incense burner. His shoe came off and flew across the room. ‘Stop!’ said his companion. ‘That’s enough!’ She found her tongue, and also, to her own surprise, a rush of reckless anger. Kill me if you want, but really, isn’t it enough? Isn’t it enough that my son-in-law is dead? A tense pause, and then the muzzle of the gun was pointing at the floor, and she was looking at their departing backs.
Worry, always in the wings, became a constant presence. Worry about her children in Addis, where the conflagration was fiercest. Worry about her daughters, her granddaughters. She worried herself sick about Molla, now serving as a doctor on the northern shore of Lake Tana and one terrible day arrested as he worked. She went to see him, carrying food to the prison gates like all the other women all over the country. He had been in leg irons for days and was covered in lice and fleas. He tried to make her laugh, as he always tried to make her laugh, to reassure her he would not be there long, but all she could do was cry and pray and glance over and over at the windows, sure soldiers would shoot through them at any moment. In the event he was right – he was released quite quickly – but her children stuck even more zealously to minimum news after that. It would be years before she discovered much about his next posting, how as a battlefield doctor in the war against Somalia he spent part of his time training local women in midwifery and family planning, preaching against female circumcision in an area where women suffered total infibulations rather than the partial cutting of the highlands. How one day he had been sent, with a ninety-soldier guard and the general’s gun, to inspect an area where cholera had taken hold. How on their way there they saw a giraffe blown to pieces by a roadside bomb and on their way back vultures dropping out of the sky. How as they approached they ran into an ambush, a bitter rain of bullets that killed twenty of the soldiers in his escort. How he spent the night applying tourniquets and comforting the wounded and praying that his two-year-old son would not have to accompany a coffin back to Addis. All this he kept to himself, protecting her.
But from some things she could not be protected. Hangings had begun again, from the branches of the sycamore fig, and floggings, convicted criminals bound hand and foot and thrown to the ground in the market to receive forty or eighty lashes, each lash counted out by the watching crowd. Political prisoners were treated differently. Nearly every day, it sometimes seemed, military vehicles full of young men and women arrived at the prison round the corner. They were not executed in broad daylight but after nightfall, after the curfew, and they were shot rather than hanged or whipped, machine guns chugging through their awful cycle, the sound impossible to block out however she might cover her head and stop up her ears, every scream and echoing edge loud and louder because the air was so still and everything so silent, listening. Then she would throw herself across the ground in distress. Or she would tie her girdle tighter about herself until she could scarcely breathe, trying to stop the pain. Sometimes she would return to her senses knowing time had passed but not where she had been.
The next morning she would keep her grandchildren home from school because she knew the bodies would be thrown out on the roadsides for parents to retrieve, and she did not want them to see. There was no one who did not know someone dead, disappeared, dying; no parent, it seemed to her, who did not spend their days remonstrating, please, don’t join them – whichever side ‘them’ happened to be – don’t fight, don’t retaliate, think, please think. But their children replied that it was the dawn of a new age, and parents knew nothing. She could not rid her mind of stories she heard, stories that could have been just gossip, or just as easily true, of sons killing parents who tried to stop them, of a young man captured, his arms spread wide like Yesus Christos, his feet tied together, his hands pinned to the ground with nails, his eyes spilled out of his head and his entrails cast across the ground like a sheep’s. Hating to be alive, hating creation and everything in it, she took to her bed.
And then someone transferred Abunè Theophilos from Menelik’s palace, where he was under arrest, to Asratè Kassa’s old home, and strangled him.
NEHASSÉ
THE TW
ELFTH MONTH
Heavy rains. Fishing in muddy, turbulent rivers.
Small amount of sowing. Cattle taken upland.
…WHEN I PRAY UNTO THEE, I THE SINNER AND TRANSGRESSOR, DO THOU O VIRGIN MARY, INCLINE THINE EAR TO THE VOICE OF MY PETITION.
The rain pounded on the roof and rattled through the guttering. She could feel her voice moving up her throat, the movement of her tongue, warm breath across dry lips, but the words themselves were lost against the splattering dance of raindrops on concrete.
…AND HEAR IT AND NOT BE IMPATIENT WITH ME, BUT WITH A SHINING HEART AND A PURE MIND ACCEPT THE WORD OF MY MOUTH.
The floor was strewn with grass. Among the blades lay tiny white flowers of sorghum popcorn, some still intact, others crushed by feet on the way to the kitchen, or into the sodden yard. The thin, handle-less cups were not yet washed out. Coffee grounds collected at their bases like rubble in a dry streambed.
IT IS NOT ROBES OF HONOUR MADE OF PURPLE, AND SILK, AND CLOTHS DECORATED AND ADORNED WITH DIVERS COLOURS…BUT I LAY OUT MY SOUL BEFORE THEE IN THE PLACE OF GLORIOUS APPAREL DECORATED WITH GOLD…AND TO THEE I…DECLARE…MY…MY…SIN…
She stumbled. For an instant the words on the page before her became just marks again, discrete letters, as they had been for most of her life. The hide binding felt rough in her hands. A breath. A look up, and then down, and the words came back into focus, the letters joined together again to form meaning, their dark little legs and arms and heads gesturing toward worlds she could walk into on her own now, at her own speed and her own behest.
I HAVE FOUND THEE A REFUGE FROM THE CORRUPTION WHICH IS ON EARTH, AND FROM THE PUNISHMENT WHICH IS FOR EVER. I HAVE FOUND THEE A REFUGE FROM THE LIONS OF THE NORTH, WHICH ROAR MIGHTILY, AND SNATCH AWAY WITH VIOLENCE, AND HUNT THE YOUNG AND SHOW NO MERCY TO THE OLD, AND GAPE WITH THEIR MOUTHS TO SWALLOW UP THEIR PREY.
When the literacy cadres came knocking she had looked into their zealous faces and told them she could already read and write even though – apart from being able to sign her name as Edemariam had taught her, and which she duly demonstrated – this was not true. Caught between the demands of the revolution and the far older demands of tradition and respect for their elders, they bowed and left.
Then one morning, which she would for ever after remember was the festival of the Mount of Olives, she had gone to retrieve some cash from its hiding place between the leaves of one of the children’s school primers. She had always thought the letters beautifully printed, appreciating them as familiar objects, and on a more abstract level as tools in her children’s and grandchildren’s education, but this time words leapt out at her. Sentences. The hyena ate the cow. Kebedè bought some basil. It was as though an angel had alighted on her shoulder and with a sweep of his wings unveiled a new dimension. Every day she looked again. The dog walked down the road. Kebedè, who seemed a busy sort of fellow, brought home a mortar and pestle. She felt radiant with amazement and exhilaration as the world lifted, expanded, spread itself out before her.
I HAVE FOUND THEE A REFUGE FROM THE WOLVES WHICH DO NOT SLEEP TILL THE DAWN, WHICH SEIZE AND CARRY OFF AND LEAVE NO SHEEP UNTOUCHED, AND SPARE NEITHER THE YOUNG GOAT NOR THE LAMB. I HAVE FOUND THEE A REFUGE FROM THE FACE OF THE BOW AND FROM THE MOUTHS OF SPEARS AND SWORDS, AND FROM EVERY INSTRUMENT OF WAR.
She often thought, after that, of Yared, who as a boy was not a good student. His teacher often beat him and so he ran away, into the countryside. He was resting under a fig tree, listening to the sounds of the birds and the waterfalls, when he noticed a little worm trying to climb the trunk. The worm would get partway up then fall back, try again, get very slightly further, fall back. For hours he watched it, until at last it gained the canopy and began to eat the figs. It was a pivotal point in his life. He returned to school and eventually became the first composer of Ethiopian church music, and a saint. So she thought of him and of the worm and after her own vision kept trying too, again and again and again. The simple sentences became longer, more complex. She read of Golgotha, and picked a stumbling path through the psalms of David.
I HAVE FOUND THEE A REFUGE FROM THE HANDS OF ALL MINE ENEMIES, AND FROM THE HANDS OF THOSE WHO HATE MY SOUL. WHO CAN STRIKE TERROR INTO HIM THAT PUTTETH HIS TRUST IN THY NAME?
She read all the chapters in the Book of Job and the Book of the Praise of Mary; she returned to a favourite story, that of the saint Christos Semra, who became a nun out of contrition after losing her temper with a servant and accidentally killing her. Who after her time at Debrè Libanos prayed for many years in a hole in the ground out of the sides of which spears protruded, piercing her each time she moved. After decades of supplication Christos Semra began to feel she ought to attempt to reconcile Satan and God, and so she travelled to the lips of Sheol and called lovingly: ‘Satnayél! Satnayél!’ The devil came, and began to drag her down into his abode by her eyelashes. The archangel Mikael had to split the abyss open with a bolt of lightning to get her out, but with her Christos Semra brought ten thousand souls, who leapt with gladness into the light. She had read the story so many times she felt she knew this female saint; she longed to go to Tana Qirqos, the island on which Christos Semra, having reached the grand old age of 375, was buried, and which, on the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth month, became a place of pilgrimage. She had flown over it so many times on her way to Addis. If only she could set foot upon it.
I BESEECH THEE, O VIRGIN MARY, THAT THY PRAYER MAY BE TO ME A SHIELD OF HELP, AND THAT THE POWER OF THE ARMS OF THY FIRSTBORN MAY COME DOWN TO DELIVER ME. LET THE POWER THAT BREAKETH THE MOUNTAINS COME TO OVERTHROW MINE ENEMY. LET THE POWER THAT ROLLETH UP THE HEAVENS COME TO CAST DOWN HIM WHO WOULD OPPRESS ME.
All those who had testified against her husband began to leave the world.
Witness one died when surgical stitches in his abdomen, an Italian job that had lasted for decades, finally ruptured. His intestines unravelled and he expired in agony.
Witness two died in prison having stolen an ox.
Witness three died when his body erupted in pustules and his flesh began to peel away.
Witness four had a stroke.
Witness five died blind.
And she felt that she stood taller.
THOU WAST NAMED ‘BELOVED WOMAN’, THOU BLESSED AMONG WOMEN. THOU ART THE SECOND CHAMBER, IN THAT THOU WAST CALLED ‘HOLIEST OF HOLIES’, AND IN IT WAS THE TABLE OF THE COVENANT AND ON IT WERE TEN WORDS WHICH WERE WRITTEN BY THE FINGERS OF GOD.
In the middle of the twelfth month the festival of the Transfiguration, a festival of flames and torchlight, of boys singing, going from door to door minting verses, begging for alms. Boys who each year grew younger and younger as their brothers and friends disappeared. The luckier boys were hidden by their parents or smuggled out of the country. The less lucky – the poor, mostly – were pressed into the army by a government desperate to stem losses in the wars against Eritrea and Somalia. Not that this was the official story. Officially there were only wild war-boasts and vast slogan-littered march-pasts; few knew much for sure, but the garrison at Azezo was huge now and nothing could stop the rumours of desertion and confusion and terrible morale, of battles where hundreds of men were sent charging over minefields, then hundreds more sent after them, forced to march over their comrades’ shattered bodies. There were soldiers everywhere, soldiers often so spooked, so trigger-happy, that I remember rounds of machine-gun bullets fired into the heart of a tornado, where they joined the tree branches and sheets of corrugated iron flying like dark leaves of paper through the tarnished sky. They had to land somewhere, of course; my grandmother overruled my curiosity, shoved me and my cousin into her wardrobe, then, with the house help and a neighbour or two, stood in front of it, forming a human shield while we crouched among soft white dresses that smelled of incense and woodsmoke and limes and tried to imagine what was going on. They were aiming, the soldiers said when the storm had passed, to kill the devil in the wind.
She like everyone else saw the grey-green trucks that cra
wled through the streets, boys standing in the open backs, gripping the wooden slats or slumped down against them, faces hidden away. Like everyone else she knew the trucks stopped to let soldiers leap out and grab more boys off the street, boys who attempted to run away, boys who thought they were too young and thus immune, but they were not immune, because few checked or cared whether they were tall for their age or even what their age might be.
And she mourned them as though they were already dead, because so many did not come back, and if they did it was so often as paraplegics or with missing limbs, lost either in war or because they had shot off toes, trigger fingers, when they could think of no other method of escape and they did not want to or could not join the multitudes in prisoner-of-war camps or those who walked for days into the Sudan, stumbling into heat and endless exile. So many boys mutilated in this way the sight attained a kind of twisted normality.
AND BECAUSE OF THIS WE ALL MAGNIFY THEE, O OUR LADY, THOU EVER PURE GOD-BEARER. WE BESEECH THEE AND LIFT OUR EYES TO THEE, SO THAT WE MAY FIND MERCY AND COMPASSION WITH THE LOVER OF MEN.
There had always been a measure of watching; the emperor had had his spies, his efficient and secretive reporting systems, but this was of a different order. Mengistu’s little eyes followed her across shops, post offices, banks, looked down at her from billboards as she walked the streets. Often he was joined by a trinity of bearded white men – MarxEngelsandLenin, said the children, running them together into one entity, but she was none the wiser. Soldiers manned checkpoints and patted down anyone entering or leaving official buildings; militiamen in grubby cotton gabis carrying Kalashnikovs lounged at urban association gates or strolled down back streets, looking, listening, threatening. Everyone knew and if they did not know suspected that behind the police officers, the militiamen, the soldiers in uniform, there were secret security forces, that death squads still roamed the shadows and the prisons overflowed, even though the Terror was theoretically over. And then there were the private watchers, the friends who proved to be less than friends, the siblings who found themselves on opposite sides, the strangers who were slightly too interested, the wide spaces that opened up alongside phone conversations because of the invisible, listening presences. Everyone knew not to say anything of import if they could help it. Or to look around and about and then around and about again before a rushed whispering – or thinking better of it altogether.
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