“Look at the sky, look!” he exclaimed, pointing to the spot where others were already staring, their mouths hanging open. Melaku tipped out of the window of his kiosk, body draped on the counter.
In the center of the sky, surrounding the burning sun, were halos of vivid colors—red, yellow, orange, blue—with dark, nearly burnt edges.
An old woman, her wrinkled face set in a stern frown, shook her head. “It’s a curse. See that dark lining at the ends? Satan’s setting heaven on fire.” She sighed sadly but remained transfixed by the colors. “He’s winning.”
“It’s a blessing!” one neighbor shouted. “Things will change.”
Sara felt herself sway under the red-circled heat. Her mother had described such a sun on the day she’d decided to take the Italian’s life. She’d told her that even as she closed her eyes, froze her body, and began to squeeze the general’s neck, the colors from the sun had stayed under her eyelids, brightening her darkness.
“Don’t stare so long,” the old woman warned her.
Sara saw several patrons run home, but more emerged from their compounds and gathered in groups on the road. There were so many people it was beginning to look like the start of a procession. Several were on their knees praying with upturned palms. Sara noticed soldiers looking up as well, confusion and curiosity on their faces. Their forgotten guns leaned clumsily against their thighs or drooped behind their shoulders. Shiferaw stood apart from everyone, gawking into the sky with his deformed smile.
“What do you think it is?” she asked Melaku.
“It’s a sign of forgiveness,” he replied. “It’s a sign of redemption for the people we’ve become.” He rubbed his eyes. “Come inside.”
He gave her a stool and offered her a Coca-Cola. “It’s my last one. Our socialist friends don’t realize this is an imperialist drink.” He sat next to Sara and patted her leg, all energy drained from him, suddenly older and tired.
“Save it,” Sara told him, setting the bottle back on the counter. “Are you all right?”
He was already lost in thought. “I used to be a good man,” he said.
Melaku’s words traced the days when he stood atop a shaky wooden lookout and swung a slingshot at the hyenas that prowled near his father’s goats. He wove a tale of the young son of a peasant who found himself in an emperor’s palace and used his songs to mingle with noblemen and princesses, senators and princes.
“Then I met a girl,” he said. “But her father wanted grandchildren worthy of palaces. Elsa. My Elsa. I wasted all my money on this spoiled girl while my father was breaking his back in the sun. He died while I was in the palace,” Melaku said. “I was too busy wooing Elsa to go back when they told me he was sick. I thought I had time.”
“If you knew you’d have gone back,” Sara said.
He continued, leaning forward. “What do we ever know about the time we have? What do we know about anything? When they installed a box at the police station to inform on reactionaries, I put Elsa’s husband’s name in it. They took both of them, even her father, an old, old man by then. They had to carry him and his wheelchair out of his house. When I realized these new officers were nothing but murderers, I tried to get them out but I couldn’t. They’re gone.”
He draped both hands over his head and pressed into his temples. “I asked for a sign that I could forgive myself. Show me there’s still light underneath all this I said. I started helping Dawit, penance for all the people I destroyed.” He moved his hand across his chest. “Show me, I said, because my heart couldn’t feel. I watched for signs every day, every night we collected a body, I worried I’d find Elsa, I prayed I’d find Elsa, I prayed to get caught. But I see something today in this sun. I’ve seen it.” He pointed outside. “This sun.”
—
“DID YOU SEE THAT?” Dawit asked, pointing to the sun. “All those colors. What is it?” Dawit tried to distract himself from Solomon’s instructions on his new assignment, details about his new weapon, reminders to aim for the cleanest kill. All happening that day.
“You’re good, almost better than me.” Solomon reached in the back of his car and took out the suitcase Dawit had once given him, the one that held a dead soldier’s rifle. Inside was the same AK-47. “Remember this?” Solomon asked, holding up the weapon. “I saved it for you. It’s been tested, works well, you don’t need to squeeze as hard as the older model I gave you last week. Everything else is the same.” He pointed to the trigger, then clenched his fist to hide a hand that was shaking more than usual. “Practice some rounds now, then we have to go.”
Dawit took the weapon and tried to control his shivers. He was holding the gun of a man he’d killed, on his way to kill another. He looked into the sky again. There had been a time when all he’d wanted to do was help the defenseless.
“What’s wrong?” Solomon asked.
“Do you think this means something, the sun? I’ve never seen it like this,” Dawit asked, trying to hide his thoughts.
“Are you scared?” Solomon slammed the trunk shut. “We can’t depend on signs.”
“No.” There was a tightness climbing in Dawit’s chest. The first waves of nausea descended.
Solomon put an arm on his shoulder. “I’ll drop you off at Revolution Square, there’s a big rally. You’ll see a line of Mercedes and jeeps. When you hear the first shot, aim for the second-to-last car and start shooting. Simple.”
“Who am I aiming for?” Dawit asked, beginning to sweat.
“Anyone in that car. With enough of us, we’ll have full coverage. As soon as you fire, get lost in the crowd. Meet me back here.” Solomon took in the clearing in the forest. “If you’re not here by curfew, I’ll have to come back the next day.”
“People will see me with the gun.”
“I’ve brought a uniform for you.” Solomon sized him up. “It’ll fit. You’ll be second in line to shoot, people will think you’re aiming for the first shooter. Don’t waste a second. Aim for the backseat. Keep shooting until you can’t. Run with the crowd.”
Dawit wondered if Solomon could smell the sourness in his breath. Fear this strong had a taste.
“I don’t care who else you get, and if you don’t get him, there’s a good chance somebody else will. We failed the first time, we know what to do now.” Solomon flexed his hands. “I don’t mind fear, I hate doubts.”
“I’m sure,” Dawit replied.
Solomon clapped him on the back. He took the time now to look into the sky. “My father told me about a sun like this once.” Then he shrugged and handed Dawit the uniform.
SARA LAY ON TOP of Yonas, chest to chest, mouth against mouth, and told him everything. She watched him listen to her stories, attentive and loving. She let his hand trail the top of her head and find the scar. “I’m my mother’s daughter,” she said. “My father was Mikael Abraham. They ran away to Qulubi and I was born there, the daughter of Abraham’s son.”
“You are my wife,” Yonas said. “I don’t care about anything else. Your history began here, with me.”
She brushed her lips over his. “It started before you.” She smiled into his eyes. “But we mold ourselves out of our fates, don’t we? My mother once said this to me.” She let her stomach rise and fall into his, felt the softness of flesh on flesh, rested in his muscles and strength. “I’ll stop grieving for what I never had, for those two. I promise.”
He hugged her tightly. “Both of us will stop grieving for those who are happier with God.”
“We’ll be a family again,” she said. “With Dawit.”
Yonas blinked back tears as Sara kissed the corner of his mouth. “You two will have a chance to talk when this is over. He’s hiding to be safe, and he’s safe. He’ll come back,” she said.
HAILU DREAMS: a truck on the road to his house roars its way to his gate, soldiers clamber out of creaking doors, scurry with a thousand legs and a hundred shouts to his window. They dangle Selam’s picture and tear it to shreds, extend a photograph of
a newborn Dawit, and with millipede legs and reptile hands rip his baby’s picture in half and Hailu hurls himself out the window into a cool breeze and a ringed dark sun and he hears above the cacophony of cockroaches and rats, above the buzz of angry locusts, his own voice come back to him, virile and steady.
63.
THE ROADS WERE deserted that afternoon, no jeeps patrolled the area, and there were no soldiers pacing in front of homes.
“It’s so quiet,” Sara said to Emama Seble. They were at Hailu’s bed, waiting for Yonas to bring Tizita from school. It was almost five o’clock. Sara looked out the window. “They should be here.”
“A big rally today,” Emama Seble said. “Guddu’s making a new announcement. There’s lots of traffic. Yonas called, didn’t he? He was going to go shopping before coming home.”
Sara nodded. “He’s waiting until the roads are less crowded. He told me there are schoolchildren practicing marches.” She stopped. “He cries about Berhane. I hear him at night but he stops when he knows I’m awake.”
“You’ve told him?” the old woman asked.
Sara nodded. “He thought there was more between Dawit and me.”
“Who wouldn’t?” She glanced at Hailu. “No news?”
“Nothing yet.” Sara unwrapped a bandage around Hailu’s chest and laid new leaves on the wounds. They were healing, slowly.
Emama Seble touched his cheek. “He’s getting better. He’s fighting back.”
DAWIT STARED AT the spectators in Revolution Square. People jostled each other and milled around. He felt the anticipation and tension in the air, the electric charge of too many bodies moving too quickly with little thought, and it made the wide-open space stifling. He turned to face Finfine River and the pale golden walls of what was once called Jubilee Palace, then looked towards the imposing Africa Hall, the shining dome of St. Estifanos Church, and settled his gaze on the trees around the square. He caught the glint of a sniper’s sunglasses through thin leaves. Soldiers flanked every corner, their ammunition belts strapped solidly across their chests and waists, eyes methodically roving past pedestrians and schoolchildren. They raked the horizon, paused at scattering groups of young people, furrowed their eyebrows at black-clad mothers, and ignored him. Dawit’s eyes were locked on a certain row high in the bleachers where two men dressed as soldiers sat far apart, legs crossed identically.
The keberos started, rolling steady drumbeats over the tempered whispers of civilians. The drummers slapped cowhide worn thin from years of use, and drilled cavernous beats into the echoing field. For a moment, people stopped their shuffling, soldiers paused mid-scan, and all eyes shifted to the young boys and girls bearing down wildly on their drums. An expectant gasp rose like a bubble to the sky. Dawit sensed what he knew everyone else sensed: that angels were speaking, reminding them that there were others also who shouted with them into the heavens. They were not alone.
A whistle blew outside, trilling screeches that broke the reverie. Children’s voices climbed into the sky, excited and shrill. The distant rumble of engines and thick tires grew louder. Military police marched towards the road in twos and threes and Dawit followed, a solitary figure walking in clipped steps towards the nearest exit.
“Don’t walk with them but stay close,” Solomon had told him. “You’ll stand at the intersection closest to the stadium and watch for the second-to-the-last Mercedes. Aim for the passengers. Keep shooting. Don’t stop, don’t worry about who else you hit. Run with the crowd.” Then he’d shaken his hand and gripped it tightly. “And if you get caught”—he’d slipped a tiny cyanide capsule into his palm. “Let the angels hear us today.”
The cavalcade moved at a crippling pace. The crowd was silent, transfixed by the oily sleekness of cars sliding over the road like a single black snake. Dawit slipped behind two women and looked around. All eyes were trained on the procession, mesmerized by the regal progress of the entourage. Schoolchildren broke the silence again with a song that praised Guddu’s latest triumphs against cowardly enemies. Drumbeats drove them on, their marching strides grew wider, their arms swung with wild exuberance. And despite the words, despite the sickle-and-star flags, despite the terror resting behind every spectator’s stare, the crowd could not help swaying to the exhilarating rush of being witness to such power and force.
From a corner across the street, Dawit saw Solomon, and behind him was Anbessa. Solomon nodded and walked into the crowd. Anbessa stepped forward, and Dawit thought he saw him wink and grin before carefully resting his rifle higher in his arm. There were five cars still remaining, then a row of soldiers, then the last two cars.
They came, one after the other, in certainty and calm. The soldiers went by, caught up in the fervor of an audience ordered to cheer and clap on the threat of death. The children shouted. The drums thudded, unstoppable. And Dawit imagined that even the trees bent and bowed from the momentum. Anbessa raised his rifle.
Dawit raised his own, scanned the last row of soldiers, made sure none looked his way. Then he released the safety and began to count.
The car slipped into view.
The driver was a crisply dressed chauffeur with a long nose and grim mouth. Then came the passengers in the backseat. Dawit slid his finger on the trigger and set the sights on the man closest to him. What he saw made him falter. Mickey: dazed, blinking rapidly, smiling benignly, waving blandly through the window. Dawit looked up quickly and saw Anbessa was intent on the car, his shoulders taut, all his concentration on the passengers, none on the soldier across the street from him pointing a rifle at an old friend, confusion rising and crashing against his stomach.
—a fat hand lifting him after a fight, the constant pushing up of black-framed glasses, the nervous smiles, the short breathy laughs that masked a calculating mind, the sweat, the obsessively ironed clothes, the stained uniform that cursed night that turned this friend inside out and upside down and then sent him back into Dawit’s life unrecognizable with a heart bludgeoned and cut to fit bite-sized into the mouth of a venomous monster this boy is no more a boy this man has never been a man, what has never been can it really be taken away?
Dawit angled the rifle against his shoulder. Before he heard the first bullet whirling through the air, he pulled the trigger and fired one shot after another, ignoring the women who dropped in front of him, then ran covering their heads. Children scattered. Soldiers fell. The Mercedes swerved, brakes squealed, Mickey slumped against the shattered window, holes drilled through his glasses. Dawit shot repeatedly, caught up in the magic of bullets roaring out of a cool polished barrel, exploding with sound, ricocheting off metal and bone. At the first empty click, he looked up, trapped in the tidal wave of panicking civilians, and walked quickly with them. He lost himself in their pressing bodies and became just another soldier trying to find a way out of the mayhem.
64.
ALL OF ADDIS Ababa erupted in chaos. Doors were torn off hinges, sons pulled from homes and shot, daughters raped, men and women hanged in public squares. Thousands were herded to prisons where morbid cries and agonized pleas spiraled out of small dark rooms.
“The Red Terror!” the still-breathing Guddu declared in Revolution Square. “The Red Terror will break the backs of these enemies of the state! They have killed one more of our brave! They have tried to kill me once again! And again, they have failed!” He pounded on a podium in front of a new crowd of terrorized and shaking spectators and held up a bottle filled with water the color of blood. “We have recently eliminated the traitor Chairman Teferi Bante for his treasonous acts against the state,” he declared, ignoring the surprised gasp from the crowd. “From Nakfa to Assab, we will destroy every Eritrean rebel! All those who want to stop Ethiopia’s progress will be eliminated. We will not stop until the gutters flow with the blood of all our enemies! We will fight bourgeois White Terror with Red Terror! Until Ethiopian soil is soaked with their bones and flesh and cries, we will not stop! Death to our enemies! Death to our enemies! Death!” He raised
the bottle higher and sent it crashing to the ground. Red-tinged shards of glass splintered and glistened in the sun. A thousand mothers and fathers sank to their knees and prayed. Young men and women braced themselves for a new onslaught of violence. And everywhere, everyone searched the heavens for signs that angels reigned, that they would listen and heed their calls for help.
As bodies piled on top of each other in city streets and public squares, as families stumbled over familiar corpses draped with signs that announced “Red Terror” in cooling blood, as mass graves grew, stories of Anbessa’s furious gun battles with the Derg’s rattled soldiers, always fought with Mekonnen and Solomon at his side, rippled through homes. The government’s search for the three men intensified. Week after week, special forces were sent into the highlands, ordered to burrow into caves and huts, destroy fields and farms, raze villages and climb to the bottom of watery wells. And still, they found nothing. It was as if, the people breathed, it was as if angels had made them invisible. Nightly, prayers were sent up for Anbessa destroyer of roadblocks, Mekonnen killer of soldiers, and Solomon the wise. The Holy Trinity, some dared to say, unafraid to blaspheme a deity who had long abandoned them.
65.
A TIRED MONK shuffled in the deep purple dark of the cave, making room for Anbessa, Solomon, and Mekonnen. His long dusty robe brushed the ground as he bowed and made the sign of the cross in front of an altar of candles and a Bible, then sat on an old leather cushion.
“We have lived here for hundreds of years without any problems. You are safe,” he said. “They cannot climb this mountain without this.” In his hands was a long, thick rope.
Solomon crouched at the entrance of the narrow cave, squinting into the sun and looking down into the valley far below them. Tall trees below the steep, rocky incline blocked them from view, leaves letting in only fragmented threads of daylight.
Beneath the Lion's Gaze Page 29