THE
SHADOW KING
A Novel
MAAZA MENGISTE
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
To my mother
for your love, for everything
To my father
for never leaving me, even though you are gone
&
To Marco
without whom none of this would have been possible
. . . hereafter we shall be made into things of song for the men of the future. —The Iliad BY HOMER, TRANSLATED BY RICHMOND LATTIMORE
Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. —ISAIAH 18:1
—what god hurls you on, stroke on stroke to the long dying fall?
Why the horror clashing through your music, terror struck to song?—
. . . Where do your words of god and grief begin? —AGAMEMNON BY AESCHYLUS, TRANSLATED BY ROBERT FAGLES
THE
SHADOW KING
PROLOGUE WAITING
1974
SHE DOES NOT WANT TO REMEMBER BUT SHE IS here and memory is gathering bones. She has come by foot and by bus to Addis Ababa, across terrain she has chosen to forget for nearly forty years. She is two days early but she will wait for him, seated on the ground in this corner of the train station, the metal box on her lap, her back pressed against the wall, rigid as a sentinel. She has put on the dress she does not wear every day. Her hair is neatly braided and sleek and she has been careful to hide the long scar that puckers at the base of her neck and trails over her shoulder like a broken necklace.
In the box are his letters, le lettere, ho sepolto le mie lettere, è il mio segreto, Hirut, anche il tuo segreto. Segreto, secret, meestir. You must keep them for me until I see you again. Now go. Vatene. Hurry before they catch you.
There are newspaper clippings with dates spanning the course of the war between her country and his. She knows he has arranged them from the start, 1935, to nearly the end, 1941.
In the box are photographs of her, those he took on Fucelli’s orders and labeled in his own neat handwriting: una bella ragazza. Una soldata feroce. And those he took of his own free will, mementos scavenged from the life of the frightened young woman she was in that prison, behind that barbed-wire fence, trapped in terrifying nights that she could not free herself from.
Inside the box are the many dead that insist on resurrection.
She has traveled for five days to get to this place. She has pushed her way through checkpoints and nervous soldiers, past frightened villagers whispering of a coming revolution, and violent student protests. She has watched while a parade of young women, raising fists and rifles, marched past the bus taking her to Bahir Dar. They stared at her, an aging woman in her long drab dress, as if they did not know those who came before them. As if this were the first time a woman carried a gun. As if the ground beneath their feet had not been won by some of the greatest fighters Ethiopia had ever known, women named Aster, Nardos, Abebech, Tsedale, Aziza, Hanna, Meaza, Aynadis, Debru, Yodit, Ililta, Abeba, Kidist, Belaynesh, Meskerem, Nunu, Tigist, Tsehai, Beza, Saba, and a woman simply called the cook. Hirut murmured the names of those women as the students marched past, each utterance hurling her back in time until she was once again on ragged terrain, choking in fumes and gunpowder, suffocating in the pungent stench of poison.
She was brought back to the bus, to the present, only after one old man grabbed her by the arm as he took a seat next to her: If Mussoloni couldn’t get rid of the emperor, what do these students think they are doing? Hirut shook her head. She shakes her head now. She has come this far to return this box, to rid herself of the horror that staggers back unbidden. She has come to give up the ghosts and drive them away. She has no time for questions. She has no time to correct an old man’s pronunciation. One name always drags with it another: nothing travels alone.
From outside, a fist of sunlight bears through the dusty window of the Addis Ababa train station. It bathes her head in warmth and settles on her feet. A breeze unfurls into the room. Hirut looks up and sees a young woman dressed in ferenj clothes push through the door, clutching a worn suitcase. The city rises behind her. Hirut sees the long dirt road that leads back to the city center. She sees three women balancing bundles of firewood. There, just beyond the roundabout is a procession of priests where once, in 1941, there had been warriors and she, one of them. The flat metal box, the length of her forearm, grows cool on her lap, lies as heavy as a dying body against her stomach. She shifts and traces the edges of the metal, rigid and sharp, rusting with age.
Somewhere tucked into the crevice of this city, Ettore is waiting two days to see her. He is sitting at his desk in the dim glow of a small office, hunched over one of his photos. Or, he is sitting in a chair drenched in the same light that tugs at her feet, staring toward his Italia. He is counting time, too, both of them tipping toward the appointed day. Hirut stares at the sunlit vista pressing itself through the swinging doors. As they start to close, she holds her breath. Addis Ababa shrinks to a sliver and slips out of the room. Ettore slumps and falls back into darkness. When they finally shut, she is left alone again, clutching the box in this echoing chamber.
She feels the first threads of a familiar fear. I am Hirut, she reminds herself, daughter of Getey and Fasil, born on a blessed day of harvest, beloved wife and loving mother, a soldier. She releases a breath. It has taken so long to get here. It has taken almost forty years of another life to begin to remember who she had once been. The journey back began like this: with a letter, the first she has ever received:
Cara Hirut, They tell me that I have finally found you. They tell me you married and live in a place too small for maps. This messenger says he knows your village. He says he will deliver this to you and bring me back your message. Please come to Addis. Hurry. There is unrest here and I must leave. I have no place to go but Italy. Tell me when to meet you at the station. Be careful, they have risen against the emperor. Please come. Bring the box. Ettore.
It is dated with the ferenj date: 23 April 1974.
The doors open again and this time, it is one of those soldiers she has seen scattered along the path to this city. A young man who lets noise tumble in over his shoulder. He is carrying a new rifle slung on his back carelessly. His uniform is unpatched and untorn. It is free of dirt and suited for his size. He is too eager-eyed to have ever held a dying compatriot, too sharp with his movements to have ever known real fatigue.
“Land to the tiller! Revolutionary Ethiopia!” he shouts, and the air in the station flees the room. He lifts his gun with a child’s clumsiness, aware of being observed. He points to the photograph of Emperor Haile Selassie just above the entrance. “Down with the emperor!” he shouts, swinging his gun from the wall to the back of the nervous station.
The waiting room is crowded, full of those who want to leave the roiling city. They breathe in and shrink away from this uniformed boy straining toward manhood. Hirut looks at the picture of Emperor Haile Selassie: a dignified, delicate-boned man stares into the camera, somber and regal in his military uniform and medals. The soldier, too, glances up, left with nothing to do but hear his own voice echo back. He shifts awkwardly, then turns and races out the door.
The dead pulse beneath the lid. For so long, they have been rising and crumbling in the face of her anger, giving way to the shame that still stuns her into paralysis. She can hear them now telling her what she already knows:
The real emperor of this country is on his farm tilling the tiny plot of land next to hers. He has never worn a crown and lives alone and has no enemies. He is a quiet man who once led a nation against a steel beast, and she was his most trusted soldier: the proud guard of the Shadow King. T
ell them, Hirut. There is no time but now.
She can hear the dead growing louder: We must be heard. We must be remembered. We must be known. We will not rest until we have been mourned. She opens the box.
THERE ARE TWO bundles of pictures, each tied with the same delicate blue string. He has written her name in loose-jointed handwriting on one, the letters ballooning across the paper folded over the stack and held in place by string. Hirut unties it and two photos slide out, sticking together from age. One is of the French photographer who roamed the northern highlands taking photos, a thin slip of a man with a large camera. On the back of the picture it reads, Gondar, 1935. This is what we know of this man: He is a former draftsman from Albi, a failed painter with a slippery voice and small blue eyes. He holds no importance except what memory allows. But he is in the box, and he is one of the dead, and he insists on his right to be known. What we will say because we must: there is also a photograph of Hirut taken by this Frenchman. A portrait shot while he visited the home of Aster and Kidane and requested a picture of the servants to trade with other photographers or exchange for film. She turns away from it. She does not want to see her picture. She wants to close the box to shut us up. But it is here and this younger Hirut also refuses a quiet grave.
This is Hirut. This is her wide-open face and curious gaze. She has her mother’s high forehead and her father’s curved mouth. Her bright eyes are wary but calm, catching light in golden prisms. She leans into the space in front of her, a pretty girl with slender neck and sloping shoulders. Her expression is guarded, her posture peculiarly stiff, absent the natural elegance that she will not know for many years is hers. She looks away from the camera and struggles not to squint, her face turned to the biting sun. It is easy to see the sharp slope of her collarbone, the scarless neck that rises from the V collar of her dress. It is this picture that will preserve the unmarked expanse of skin that spreads across her shoulders and back. No other way to recall the unblemished body she once carried with the carelessness of a child. And look, in the background, so far away she is hard to see, there is Aster, pausing to watch, an elegant line cutting through light.
BOOK 1 INVASION
1935
HIRUT HEARS ASTER SHOUTING HER NAME, CALLING FOR HER IN A voice threatening to break from strain. Hirut looks up from the slow burning fire she is tending in a corner of the courtyard. She is hunched into a stool, next to a pile of onions waiting to be peeled. The cook is behind her in the kitchen, chopping meat for the evening meal. Aster should be drinking her coffee in bed, tucked inside a soft blanket, perhaps looking out the window and gazing at her flowers. This should be a quiet morning. Hirut stiffens at the intrusion. Then Aster calls Hirut’s name again, and this time, she is speaking so loudly, with such exertion, that the cook pauses her rapid slicing, the morning birds fall silent, and even the large tree just outside the gate seems to catch the breeze to hold itself still. For an instant, nothing moves.
What did I do? Hirut feels her hands shaking.
The cook leans out of the kitchen door, startled: She’s in our room. She points toward the servants’ quarters. What’s she doing in there? Hurry, get up.
Hirut drops the twig she was using to shift charcoal and scrambles up. The thought forms: Aster is in the servants’ quarters. She is in that small box of a room that Hirut shares with the cook, that place where they go at night to shed their usefulness and sleep. It is a room separated from the many-roomed house where Aster lives with her husband, Kidane. It is a space that is not a space, a room that is less than a room. It is a dark hollow carved into endless tired nights. It is not meant to be seen in daylight. It is not meant for someone like Aster.
She’s in there? Hirut asks.
She’s never gone in there before. The older woman is leaning out of the doorway, her strong arms holding on to each side of the frame as she stretches to look at the narrow path that extends toward the servants’ quarters, as if she is afraid to leave the safety of her kitchen. Did Kidane come back?
Hirut shakes her head. Kidane took his horse and left before dawn.
So it’s just us, the cook says. She was arguing with Kidane when I was getting his things ready.
Hirut wants to tell the cook that Aster should, in fact, be in bed. She should be lying still to ease the pain of her monthly bleeding. They should be proceeding through their day as usual, working until the dome of sky hangs heavy above them, weighted by thick stars.
Go on, go. The cook steps back into the kitchen, but she stares intently at Hirut, the knife held limply in her hand. She can’t start looking in our things, she adds. She adjusts the scarf on her head, pushes back the few stray strands of gray hair poking out in front.
The cook is talking about the old rifle Hirut’s father gave her just before he died. Along with the dress she came with and the small necklace she is wearing, Hirut has nothing else that is hers in this world.
Everything’s hidden, she says, because the cook seems unusually nervous.
Aster calls her name again, insistence giving way to unrestrained anger.
The cook bends as if pulled by that voice. Go! she shouts. And answer her!
Hirut spins on her heels. I’m coming! She dashes to the servants’ quarters.
She stands at the door of the servants’ quarters and she sees for the first time how truly small it is, how dingy and shrunken the space she has called home for almost a year. In the semidarkness of the cramped room, Aster, dressed in a lovely abesha chemise, feels too much for this space that is barely enough for anything. It is less than a box, it is an airless hole enclosed in mud and straw and dung. There is no proper door, no crisp windowpane. They sleep on flimsy mattresses they have to roll up so they can walk. There are only scraps of discarded blankets nailed over narrow openings, rags that trap dust and dark. It is a space made to fit two people who have been made to fit their lives around one woman and her husband. It was not built for someone used to fine clothes and fresh breezes wafting through silk curtains.
Where were you? Aster turns to her. Her short hair carves a perfect arc into the band of weak sun sliding through the window above her head. The tepid light brushes a warm glow across her smooth cheeks. She is standing in the only place where the sun can enter the room, through that tiny hole no wider than Hirut’s head, dug out of the wall like an afterthought. Each morning, the cook hooks one side of the torn curtain onto a nail to air the room, and every night she unhooks it to close it.
Where’s the necklace? Give me my necklace.
Hirut watches a feeble patch of sunlight stretch at Aster’s feet as if it, too, were at the woman’s command. Her head is down when Aster pushes through to Hirut’s side of the room.
He’s just trying to protect you. Aster lifts Hirut’s mattress and lets it fall, wiping her hands on the corner of the dress that looks too white in the dim room. She picks up the small crate that Hirut and the cook use to store their few belongings and shakes out the meager contents. He said he lost it but I know it’s here.
Aster drops the crate and peers down, one hand smoothing the front of her long abesha chemise. She is a graceful woman with soft flesh where Hirut has angles and bone. She is not much taller than Hirut, but on the uneven dirt floor, she appears large and imposing.
My mother gave that to me to give to my husband when I married. I know he didn’t just lose it. She narrows her eyes as she looks down at Hirut. He’s hiding something.
Hirut hunches her shoulders the way the cook has taught her. She wants to say it is not her fault that Aster fights with her husband, Kidane. It is not Hirut’s fault that he is kind to her, she cannot help that this makes Aster cry.
I don’t know where it is, she says. She knows that in the early days of mourning for their only son, Aster threw away many things. She made a heap of her finest dresses and capes and even jewelry and set them on fire in the compound, pounding her chest as flames began to chew into the items. The cook said there were some things Aster still looked for
, forgetting she burned them. I’ve never seen it, Hirut adds.
So you want me to believe Kidane threw it away? Then she laughs. Or do you want me to think he gave it to you himself?
Kidane is the one her mother used to call “brother” and “friend” and sometimes she even said, Hirut, he is like my son though we are not so far in age. I cared for him when his mother died. I carried him on my back when I was no more than a child myself. He and I, we grew up together. This is a man who has shown me kindness, and if I am ever gone, he will take care of you. And because he was so loved by her mother, Hirut came to this house after her parents’ deaths already loving him. It is not her fault that he loves her, too, that he calls her Little One, and Little Sister, and Rutiye.
Do you know what we do to thieves? Aster asks. In the somber light of the room, it is hard to see the beauty she is always so proud to display: the bright eyes and high cheeks, the full lips and the slender neck that slopes down to shoulders that have not borne the breaking weight of water jugs and firewood. If I find it here, not even Kidane will be able to help you.
Hirut knows what happens to thieves. She has seen those pitiful boys and men begging in the mercato, their skinny bodies hobbled by a missing leg and hand, their eyes still wide from the shock of the cruel loss. A sourness seeps into the back of her throat.
Aster lifts Hirut’s mattress. Then she is unrolling it and undoing the rope Hirut uses to cinch her gun in place. The cook said Aster would take it away if she saw it, but Hirut never thought that Aster could come into this place that was only for servants. She thought there were places that Aster did not go. Hirut cannot breathe as she watches the rope slip off the mattress. It has been so long since she has been home, so long since she has known what it was like to move without asking permission, to do what needed to be done rather than what was demanded. Once, she had been more than a servant. She had been someone unafraid to own what was rightly hers.
The Shadow King Page 1