“Tell me,” the Colonel said, still facing the window. His hands were neatly folded behind his back. There was no trace of Hailu’s blood on him. He’d remained as immaculately clean as ever, as composed and controlled as a priest at prayer.
Hailu replied the same way he’d been replying, his memory for new words failing him. “She was weak.” He saw the Colonel’s hands tighten and his fingers pale from squeezing.
“Yes,” the Colonel said, nodding. “Weak. What else?”
“She had cuts on her legs.”
“And?” The Colonel nodded, brushing aside the detail.
“The bottoms of her feet had been burned, then whipped.”
“This is a lie,” he said, softer. “I know this is a lie, Doctor. But please go on. I have plenty of time to get the truth from you.” He tipped towards Hailu, his face watching his mouth intently.
“She’d been raped,” Hailu said through clenched teeth.
“It’s a privilege to be alive.” The Colonel backed away from him, he was talking fast, sweating. He began to pace. “To have the chance to see your children again, isn’t it?” He wiped his hands on a stark white handkerchief. “Do you love your children, Doctor?” he asked, staring at Hailu.
Hailu’s jaw was too rigid to talk. He tried to nod and found that his head felt welded to his vertebrae. He followed the Colonel’s pacing with frantic eyes he was sure would bleed again if moved too fast. He felt his head being pulled back by a fistful of hair until he was staring, wide-eyed, into the bright beam of the lightbulb. The Colonel’s face hovered above him.
“Tell me you love your children.”
“I love them,” Hailu said.
“Tell me what you would do if Dawit was brought in front of you right now and strapped into another chair. I could do that, you know. We have him.”
“No,” Hailu said. “No.” But he didn’t know what he was protesting, he didn’t know anything anymore. For a fleeting moment, he thought he saw Dawit huddled in the corner, tired and bruised, but when he blinked, there was nothing.
Hailu flinched as the Colonel’s hand came to rest on the electrical switch. He tried to stop the whimper that fled from his lips as his body jerked and burned and froze all at once. The bells clanged behind his eyes, he smelled his hair singeing. A hundred red ants scurried inside his stomach. He was cooking, his blood reaching the boiling point in milliseconds that stretched into eternal minutes. The ants were trying to chew their way out. If he hadn’t already emptied his bowels in the last rounds of shocks, he knew he would have loosed shit and piss onto the floor again.
The Colonel watched it all with disinterest.
“What are we without our children, Doctor? If we could stop their suffering, what is our own?” The Colonel wiped his face, his eyes, dried the sweat that had collected on his upper lip. “What is our own?” He lifted his hand off the electric switch to take Hailu’s. He used his handkerchief to avoid the wounds. “Are you a good father?” he asked, curious. He caressed Hailu’s hand, paternal and affectionate. “Would your son call you a good father?”
Hailu’s head sank into his chest. “No,” he said. “No.”
“Wouldn’t you give anything to get another chance to right your wrongs?”
Hailu didn’t know when the Colonel had moved across the room to watch him with intense concentration.
“Wouldn’t you give anything to fix your mistakes?” the Colonel asked, his back as straight as the wall behind him.
“Dawit,” Hailu said. “Dawit,” he said again, aching for a memory of a good moment between them.
The Colonel sagged against the wall. “Wouldn’t you want to kill the man who stood in your way?” Then, slowly and clearly, the Colonel said: “I’m asking you to tell me the truth. What did she say to you? Whose name did she give you?”
“She asked for her father. That’s all she said, ‘Abbaye.’”
The Colonel strode in front of him and landed another blow on his face with a fury that exploded from every pore. “You’re playing games! Don’t lie to me! I can kill you this instant!”
Hailu caught a thread of panic in the Colonel’s voice.
“Don’t say that to me again!” The Colonel began to choke Hailu. “Don’t say that,” he said. “I know what you’re doing.”
A fist slammed into Hailu’s face. Another tooth swam in his mouth, then down his throat. The room spun.
“She was brought in a plastic bag,” Hailu groaned.
“A plastic bag?” The Colonel fell back, his hold loosening from Hailu’s neck. “A plastic bag? No. She wasn’t. She wasn’t taken to Girma. She wasn’t taken to that monster.” He held his head. “She wasn’t to go there.” He paced again, his attention on his steps, on his feet, his teeth gnawing on his cheek. “You only wanted to fix your mistakes.”
The Colonel rested his hand on the electrical switch again. Then he continued talking, his whole body shaking. “Are you telling me they disobeyed my orders and took her to that butcher? Are you expecting me to believe you were merciful in killing her? Is that it?” The Colonel stood over him, his eyes wet, his head moving from side to side. “What have I done?” he whispered again and again.
DAWIT AND SOLOMON sat in a hut in Sululta. Dawit shivered, his thin shirt no defense from the nighttime chill. He’d assumed this would be a short meeting, and now Solomon was telling him something different.
“I need to get in touch with my family,” Dawit said. “They’ll worry,” he added when the man didn’t respond.
“We can’t take that chance. The military’s crawling all over Addis looking for Mekonnen the killer of soldiers.” Solomon had a rifle on his shoulder, a cigarette smoldering at the corner of his mouth, both objects seemed permanently attached to him. “Right now, they don’t know you’re Mekonnen. You’ll stay in hiding until it’s safe. If they catch you, they’ll find ways to make you talk, believe me. This is the only way to keep us all out of danger.” Solomon lit a partial cigarette and took three deep draws before throwing it on the ground. “Practice loading faster,” he said, extending his weapon to Dawit.
—
“HE DIDN’T COME home last night,” Yonas said to Sara. They were in the prayer room, trying to hide from Tizita, who’d clutched at Sara’s skirt all day asking for Dawit. “I called his friends, no one’s seen him since yesterday.” He drew the curtain on the window. “It’s not like him.”
“Lily doesn’t know anything.” The echo of gunfire rustled past the window. “She was here. She’d told him she was leaving this week and he was supposed to see her today.”
Yonas paced. The floorboard creaked under his steps.
“She’ll hear you,” Sara warned, pointing to the door. He stopped.
Yonas looked long into Sara’s face. He smoothed the red velvet cloth draped over the table. “Do you know something?”
“Like what?” Sara tried to smile but her lips only trembled, then slipped back into a grim line.
He kept quiet, intent on her expressions, on the secrets they both knew she kept.
“Don’t do that,” she said. She waited for him to respond. “Say something,” she said.
He gave a jolt. “His suitcase. Where’s his suitcase?” He pushed Sara aside and ran down the stairs. “Did they take him away when we were gone somewhere?”
Sara found Yonas in Dawit’s closet rummaging through the piles of clothes and shoes. He yanked a suitcase from the bottom of a heap. “It’s here.” He clung to it, turning away from her. “It’s here.”
54.
THE MORTICIAN OPENED a thick metal door. “We keep them in here until their families come,” he said to Yonas, wiggling a toothpick in the large gap between his teeth. “It takes a while for some, they don’t want to admit the truth.” He let the door shut behind him. “Tell me what he looks like, I’ll go in and check.”
“He looks like me.”
The mortician shook his head. “You all say the same thing. Do you have a picture?”
“Any birthmarks, scars, age?”
“He’s twenty-seven, tall like me, he wears a green shirt a lot, it’s his favorite.” His younger brother’s image came to him in fragments: the wide openness of his grin, the laugh lines around his eyes, the strong lines of his jaw, the frailty of the ankle he’d broken as a small boy.
The mortician tapped on the door. “We’re full in here, I need more details. Some of the families don’t have a hundred and twenty-five birr so we’re waiting for them. Not enough cold storage in this entire city.”
“A hundred and twenty-five birr?”
The mortician sighed wearily. “The bullet fee. If a bullet was used to kill your brother, I have to charge you for it before you can get the body. Policy. I thought everybody knew.”
Yonas was too stunned to say anything.
The mortician seemed to take pity on him. “Listen,” he said. “I’ll try to see if I can find him, but I don’t have much time.” He went into the room.
It had been nearly a week and Dawit hadn’t come home. Sara, finally panicked after what seemed too long to him, had walked from house to house in their neighborhood asking for his whereabouts. Yonas had gone to his father’s jail and worked his way down the long line of people asking about his brother. Many knew him, but none had seen him in a week.
“They might have got him, he was one of the loud ones here,” said a tired-looking man with deep wrinkles around his mouth. “He was a good boy.” Then the old man had sank onto the top step of the jail. “They know which ones to get.”
The mortician came out of the room. “Nothing. Did you check the roads around your house?”
“I’ve checked everywhere.”
“You have to do it every day. If you can’t, I know someone. He’s very good, cheap,” the mortician said.
“Cheap?”
At this, the thin man laughed. “He’s smart. He should charge extra for going into the hills and checking in the river, but who can afford that?” The mortician took him by the elbow. “Come back with a picture, I’ll have my friend look.”
“Let me go in.” Yonas fished in his pockets and pulled out money.
“Go home.”
Yonas pressed the money into his moist palm and squeezed it closed.
“Have it your way,” the mortician said, slipping the money into his pocket. He swung the door open and turned his head away from the smell. “Excuse the mess.”
The mortician handed Yonas a small box of toothpicks from his jacket. “They help keep the smell out, at least I like to think so.” He smiled, then let the grin slip off his face. “If he’s in there, I can’t let you have the body until you pay. They shoot them after they’re dead if they killed them some other way, just to collect the fee.”
THEY WERE LINED UP in rows in various stages of decay and undress. They lay on dulled metal gurneys shoved into each other. From somewhere, the jagged breathing of a hungry hyena drifted by. He fumbled in his pocket for his father’s prayer beads.
Jaws slack from agony and shock, hands tangled in a web of broken fingers, and the same heartbreaking gaze of a trapped animal on every face. There wasn’t enough air in the room. Yonas realized his breathing came in quick, short takes; he began to get dizzy, began to feel the weight of breathlessness, and a pocket of something warm and black and overpowering rose from the center of his chest and worked its way up. He knew when it reached his head he’d faint. Dawit wasn’t in this room, couldn’t be.
55.
SELAM BLUE AND brilliant sits in the cold gray of his concrete cell, her crosses bright as new leaves after a rain. She opens her arms and Hailu feels his heart slipping out of his body. She is as young as when they married, when it was just the two of them discovering each other. He sits up, feels trapped by this aged body, by this strange lack of sound, listens for the tiniest echo of his breathing, brings a hand to his mouth, feels his breath against his palm, can’t hear himself. Ice climbs up his spine, twists its way into his stomach, rests in his bones, sinks to the marrow. Selam is fading. A weight tugs at his head, closes his throat, paralyzes him. His jaw aches, he breathes through his nose, inhales mucus, feels like he is drowning even as he tells himself that it is impossible.
BOOK FOUR
56.
“REVOLUTIONARY MOTHERLAND OR death!”
Clouds of dust swarmed around a group of prisoners marching past numb-faced onlookers. They moved with military precision, stiff legs rising and falling in rhythm. Bored soldiers stood at each street corner with rifles tilted casually towards the prisoners.
“Long Live Marxism!” the marchers cried.
“Louder, anarchists! Stand straight!” a long-necked soldier shouted to an old man leaning on a young girl. He ignored the flies that crept near his eye.
The young girl raised her hand to her mouth to shout louder. She pushed the old man off her shoulder and adjusted the tattered collar of her red shirt. A deep gash exposed the pink of open flesh on her collarbone.
“Viva Proletariat Ethiopia! Viva Guddu!” she cried with the rest.
“Raise the signs higher! Don’t slow down!” the soldier yelled at a row of boys holding handmade signs against their bony hips.
Berhane limped off to the side. “Viva Guddu!” he cried. He dropped his sign and pulled his sagging shorts over his waist, revealing angry, infected wounds on each leg. “I don’t have a belt,” he whimpered to the boys marching on without him. “Wait for me.”
“I said don’t slow down!” The soldier raised his rifle. He edged his finger towards the trigger and leaned his face closer to the rifle’s steel frame. “Didn’t you hear me?”
Berhane scrambled to pick up his sign. “I’m hurrying!”
He looked up just in time to see the hollow-eyed stare of the gun and hear his own sharp breath. The soldier pulled the trigger. The loud pop of exploding gunfire silenced the marchers. A puff of smoke bloomed over the fallen body.
“Keep marching!” the soldier yelled, veins drawn on his neck. “Or you’re next!”
The marchers fell into a silent pantomime, their stricken glances at Berhane hastened by the menacing aim of the soldier’s rifle. They shoved crooked-lettered placards higher, then put one foot in front of the other. Left right left right. They walked in perfect unison.
“I can’t hear you!” the soldier shouted.
“Victory for the Masses!”
“Revolution Is Joy!”
“Death to Imperialism!”
In the sun, the crooked letters, red and sloppy, shone against the dirty brown paper.
YONAS HEARD THE gunshot and turned. There was a small boy lying facedown on the road. He shook his head and tried to get through the crowd without another glance. People around him squeezed together, an immovable mass of prayers, and stared at the fallen body. Yonas tried to push through but he was blocked by chests and arms, legs and hips, trapped by the pressure of too many living bodies. He gave up and looked at his watch. It was just past noon. He’d waited two hours to get fresh meat and onions.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the unflinching momentum of bare feet trampling the small figure in a steady march forward.
“Revolutionary Ethiopia!” the marchers cried.
The crowd began to thin as the last row of marchers filed past. A group of women hurried by with tears running down their faces, their hands stifling screams.
“You!” the soldier shouted.
A stooped woman dressed in black looked at Yonas, shook her head in pity, then grabbed her friend and walked faster.
“Stop! I’m talking to you, with the bag,” the soldier said.
A few people slowed. Their glance followed the soldier’s gaze to land on Yonas. Others quickened their steps. Some stopped completely, a weary sadness etched on their faces.
Yonas stood still, his eyes on his bag. He pulled his shoulders down, hunched into himself, and prayed. He avoided the so
ldier’s glare.
“Help me get this rubbish out of the way.” The soldier was a skinny man. The whites of his eyes were the color of rust. The barrel of his rifle pointed at the small boy on the road. “He shit himself.”
Yonas looked at the dark stain that flowered from the back of the boy’s shorts and crept down his thin leg.
He was small. He looked the same age as Tizita.
“Did you hear me?” the soldier asked, standing in front of Yonas. He turned to wink at his comrades who were gathering around the two men. People dropped their heads and shuffled uncomfortably in place as the soldiers brushed past them.
“I thought we killed all the deaf last week,” one of the other soldiers joked.
“This one didn’t hear the announcement,” another quipped.
“What are you going to do, Lukas?” another said. “Call Mekonnen to get this body?” The soldiers laughed.
The sun bore heavily on Yonas, patches of sweat fanned the back of his light blue shirt. He didn’t move. He only stared at the boy in the road and tightened his grip on his plastic bag. His fingernails cut into his palms.
“I said get over there and move it out of the way!” Lukas shouted. “You should be down the road helping with the marchers, not here,” he said to the other soldiers.
The soldiers smirked. Lukas pushed close to Yonas. His sharp nose grazed his chin. He stretched his neck. “Move this body out of the road if you don’t want to die.”
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