We came here in different ways, the cook says.
Not so different.
The cook turns as if she is seeing Hirut for the first time. Get out of here.
The stable door creaks open and Hirut rushes to Berhe, who slips an arm around her shoulder, and together, they watch the two women.
There’s nothing to give you. He took it all without telling me, he took everything. You think you’re special because you’re tired? Aster speaks with a helpless anger. I just sold the rug my mother gave me to buy us guns. I’m not selling my wedding necklace for you. That’s all that’s left, she adds quietly.
The cook walks up the steps until she is directly in front of Aster. The two of them stare into each other’s faces, gazing into what the years have done. You promised that as soon as you could, you’d give me what I needed. The cook’s mouth trembles. Last year, you said next year. Then you said on Tesfaye’s birthday. You’ve got Hirut and I’m tired. I want to find my family, I want to go home.
Aster takes the cook’s hands, her voice softens. Things have changed, the war’s coming. Everyone’s mobilizing and you have no money, you’ve got nothing but me. Aster stares at her. She takes a breath. I need you.
The cook’s shoulders deflate and her head lowers while Aster raises herself taller.
Tell the girl to meet me in the sitting room, Aster says. Berhe, I have some things for you to alter. Her tone is the soft, intimate tone she was using with the cook: the old Aster is back, confident of being heard and obeyed. Get the wooden chest that’s in Kidane’s office, she says, motioning to the cook. You know the one.
Aster smooths the front of her dress. And I’m hungry. Then she goes back through the front door and shuts it behind her.
THERE ARE TWO NEW RIFLES leaning against the wall, their sleek metal and blond wood shinier than any piece of furniture. Hirut bends down and picks one up, looking quickly over her shoulder to confirm Aster is still in the kitchen talking to the cook. It is cold and heavy in her hands, sturdy as bone. She traces the long line of its barrel with a hesitant hand, stopping at the sight, going past the chamber. She flinches as she grazes the trigger, remembering her father’s warnings, then she rests her palm on the smooth plane of wood and presses down. The stock feels as warm as skin. A memory: her father taps her chest the first day he lets her touch the rifle. This is life, he says. Then he settles his palm on the gun, This is death. Never underestimate either.
Hirut carefully sets the rifle down and it angles back into place as if propelled by its own will. It is a sound that she has heard before, that slow scrape across a wall, then silence. Hirut listens carefully, past Aster’s voice, past the cook’s footsteps, past the low hum of wind brushing against windowpane and she sees her father, Fasil, falling at a stranger’s feet. She sees him wrap his arms around the man’s legs as if begging for something he knows he has lost. She is standing at the doorway of their hut, half draped in the shadows falling across her back. Her mother, Getey, is behind her, shrouded in the darkness and crying softly. Hirut hears her name and turns around. Getey is holding the rifle and telling her to move. She is pointing it at that stranger’s chest. She is breathing hard, air dragging itself out of her body and scraping inside. She is saying, Move, move, Hirut, so I can aim for Checole, stand next to me. Hirut turns back and sees Kidane take Checole’s hands and say, Abbaba please. He is saying, Getey is gone now, Abbaye. He is saying, Let’s go home. He is saying, Come with me Abbaba, and he is pulling his father along as he turns and says, I’m taking him home, Getey. It’ll never happen again. Hirut’s mother stops crying. She leans the gun against the wall and it scrapes its way to the ground. She crumbles to the floor and curls into herself. She stays like that even after Hirut comes to kneel beside her. She stays like that even when Hirut’s father runs inside and says, What have you done? Getey stays like that while Fasil lifts the gun and looks out the door and stares at no one as he empties the weapon of its single bullet.
Hirut forces her shaking hands to still. This is a new memory that has slipped out of the place where things are kept forgotten. Why was her mother crying? What was her father doing? She braces herself on the back of the sofa and looks out the window. The first time she understood she would never see her mother again was when Aster said, You will listen to everything I say. Then she dragged the long nail of her little finger across Hirut’s cheeks: You are less than the dirt in my nail.
Did you get the clothes like I asked? Aster is in the corridor, making her way into the sitting room.
Hirut hurries to the wooden chest and opens the latch.
Turn on the radio and drag the chest closer. Aster is still in that dusty black dress, but her skin has lost that pallid sheen that drew her features into a somber cast. She draws the curtains closed and gives a satisfied nod at the sight of the rifles. Then she settles on the sofa, her hands cupped delicately on her knees, and waits.
Behind Aster’s head, the sun presses into the room through the closed curtains. It is a square box of light brightening the room, striking soft lines into Aster’s curls and heightening the curves of her cheekbones. It catches on the gold necklace and skids across the room when Aster shifts. It glances across the radio then disappears.
Hirut turns the black knob and the radio hums and crackles, rebellious. She spins it until shrill trumpet music bursts from the speaker, making her jump back. Then she pulls the wooden chest closer to Aster and pauses. She once opened it without permission and rummaged through the clothes for her rifle.
A thin voice pushes through static. It is a rapid-fire speech welcoming listeners to the new Imperial Ethiopian Radio Station, broadcasting live from Akaki in Addis Ababa. The man sounds as if he has been running, as if he is shouting through a tin can.
They’re going to announce the empress, Etege Menen, and Princess Tsehai, Aster says. Listen to her, listen to every word.
The radio crackles and a thick band of static blazes into the room before a trumpet bursts through with a long trilling note.
Aster stands up. Hand me the shirt that’s in there.
Hirut knows the trunk’s contents by what it lacks. She knows it by its dimensions. She knows now that it is too short to possibly hold what she once hoped it did, but back then, when she was foolish enough to believe that some things could be made to fit into any space, she had looked. Hirut swings the latch up and tugs the chest open. She pulls out what she knows is on top: a tunic. It is a white shirt of the finest cotton, so delicate along its collarless neckline and the edges of its long sleeves that it is almost see-through. It has been preserved unusually well, still striking in its brilliance, the material smooth as silk to the touch.
Aster lifts her dress over her head and drops it to the floor. She stands naked in the room surrounded by radio static, the sun a smooth bright square on her shoulders. She sweeps her fingers into her hair to raise the curls higher.
The trumpet blares into the room. There is a long pause, a chair drags across a floor, someone clears their throat, there is a whisper.
Not everyone has one of these, Aster adds, motioning to the radio.
She slips on the tunic.
It hangs below her knees. The shoulders droop. The sleeves swallow her hands and they dangle like a pair of bent wings. Hirut is struck by how small she really is, how delicately framed her muscles and flesh. It is only her anger that makes her feel so large and imposing.
Then a man’s hurried, pitched voice:
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, once more this is a live broadcast from Akaki in Addis Ababa. It is 13 September 1935. Our emperor Haile Selassie’s wife, Empress Menen, speaks to her people tonight. We welcome those around the world who are listening. One, two, three.
Aster bows to the radio, her expression reverent. Take out the suri, she whispers.
The trousers are at the bottom, beneath a folded cape made of animal hide. She hands the suri to Aster, trying not to stare at the radio. Until now, it has been a place for leaders, a
row of men’s voices waiting inside the box for the knob to open the door and let them through. Aster slips the trousers on. Her slender calves and ankles slide through the narrow cut of the jodhpurs. It drags on the floor, layers of the finely woven cotton folding like clouds around her feet.
You didn’t clean the rug today, Aster says. She frowns and folds the legs of the jodhpurs. She tucks in the ends of the long sleeves to stop at her wrists. She adjusts the tunic so its neckline falls straight in the center of her chest. Then she stands still.
A woman starts to speak: We are grateful tonight for this opportunity to be heard by women throughout the world.
It’s her, Aster whispers. Quick, hand me the cape.
We want to thank the World Women’s League. Our beloved daughter, Tsehai, will also translate our words in English.
Empress Menen pauses and in the background, past the static and the gentle throat-clearing, Hirut can hear another voice, younger, delicate, whispering. She imagines Princess Tsehai leaning in, saying something only a daughter could say to a mother. There is the sound of shuffling paper and movement then Princess Tsehai’s voice as she introduces herself. Her voice is clear, at once shy and steady. She speaks her English with an elegant cadence that Hirut has heard on Aster and her friends: it is a mannerism that comes from a mouth unaccustomed to pleas. Hirut stares at the radio, at the large black knob and the jittery dial that is possessed by the princess’s breaths. She is spellbound trying to decipher how it is possible to hear this woman and this girl so clearly from far away. They are closer than the echo of drums that ricochet through the hills when there is news. They are here, but they are not here.
We are confident that women everywhere have the same desire in maintaining world peace and love.
The radio’s speaker is an arch of mesh, like a webbed sun. She is so close that she can feel the warm hum of it, can almost sense the empress and princess like two solid blocks of light spinning in a place where voices travel faster than flesh. Somewhere in there, past the wood and the mesh and the knob and the glass that holds the nervous dial in place, there is a royal woman who has moved outside of herself and become both vast and invisible, mighty as wind. Lost in thought, mesmerized and awestruck, it isn’t until she feels Aster nudge her leg that Hirut turns around to see what has happened.
We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction.
Aster is dressed in the tunic and jodhpurs, the stained cape across her shoulders, a new rifle slung against her back. The aged cape falls in folds, hanging in such a way that Hirut can tell it was cured by the surest hands, expertly rubbed and oiled to lie close against a body and mold to its owner’s shape. Aster shifts the new rifle from her left shoulder to her right while her legs stay firm and strong beneath her. She is resplendent. She is a fearsome and shocking figure, something both familiar and foreign, frightening and incomprehensible. A woman dressed as a warrior, looking as fierce as any man.
War kills our husbands, our brothers, and our children. It destroys our homes, and scatters our families.
While the empress continues to speak through her daughter, Hirut glances from the radio to this woman, from her small feet to her proud head, from the necklace that lies over the cape to her beautiful face, from the cape to the sleek rifle.
At this hour and in such a tragic and sad period, when aggressors are planning to bring a heavy war into our lives, we would like to bring this to the attention of all women through the world, that it is their duty to voice and express solidarity against such acts.
Aster strides purposefully into the center of the room. She is a perfect weight balancing an unruly world and grinding it back into place as she lifts a hand to her forehead, and salutes.
ETTORE NAVARRA’S FIRST SIGHTING OF ERITREA: THE PORT OF Massawa, the stunning architecture that echoes the Ottoman influences of his own Venice. From the Red Sea, the city rises out of the sweltering horizon, a shimmering patch of white arches and red dust pushing through fumes and salt. The port itself is an overcrowded slab of sand pressing into the Red Sea, its pier groaning from the endless procession of ships and soldiers. On the deck of the Cleopatra, Ettore Navarra can see that the Liguria is backed in stern-first, next to the Gange. He winces as another ship bellows in protest in its advance. So many days on quiet waves, then this: noisy steamers fighting for space, braying donkeys suspended above the crowded pier, crates of artillery scraping loudly across planks. Vessel upon vessel dotting the sea that unrolls and twists behind him as if Massawa were the site of a great and ancient Spartan clash.
As Ettore waits for the ship to anchor, he takes out his camera and begins to focus on the pier. Behind him, men are jostling for space near the railing. He can hear Fofi and Mario shouting his name, trying to get him to turn, but he is transfixed by the scene in front of him: all the white of this port city’s buildings, the tall and slender palm trees, the mountains of crates and barrels, the black men in turbans and shorts hauling supplies off ships, the cawing seagulls rushing toward a breeze.
Ettore shuts his eyes and thinks of home, of his father’s graying head bent over his books at his desk, his back to the window overlooking the Venice lagoon, their home surrounded by canals. The impending war brought with it one of the only moments in Ettore’s life when his father spoke to him with open agitation and worry. In the dim light of Leo Navarra’s study, Ettore saw both caution and disapproval in his face.
Leo said this: Not many are born when they should be. How I hope this time is meant for you.
Ettore understood even then that this was not an admission as much as it was an untelling, his father’s way of moving around what he could not say about those who were unlucky and those who were not born when they should have been. And it was said in his father’s accent: thick from words crushed in the back of his throat. When they are in public, Leo enunciates every syllable and softens consonants unnecessarily. But at home, Leo is a different man, and on that day, he released his tongue and let it slide freely between accents while speaking from the high perch of his intelligence, troubled and impatient, yet still elusive.
It is Leo’s most distinctive characteristic, his way of building silence while seeming to strip it down. His father has a way of speaking so that meaning pulses at a different frequency, nearly inaudible. Standing on deck, feeling the weight of the camera in his hand, Ettore realizes again that he has spent all his years since he was a child trying to capture what cannot be spoken, to manifest visually a world both trapped in darkness and defined by it.
THIS, OF COURSE, he will never say to Hirut, not even in the days when they are thrown together in the mountains of the Simien valley, one a prisoner of the other. There is a photograph he shows her instead of his parents on their wedding day, his father stoic and rigid, his mother shy and happy. When she tries out the new word he’s saying to her: morire, he simply nods his head and repeats it. To die: morire. I die. You die. We die. They die. To be dying. She says to him in Amharic, Innateinna abbate motewal. My mother and father have died. Memot. To die. She says it again and he points to the photograph and points to his heart. On that mountain, staring at her through the barbed-wire fence, still fumbling through the Amharic that Colonel Fucelli has insisted he learn, he does not hear what she says. He thinks morire is a verb she does not fully understand without crude gestures. So he points to the sky instead, and when she looks up, they watch a blackbird slide its way into large clouds.
ASTER AND KIDANE ARGUE IN THE COURTYARD. IT IS NOT YET DAWN, and Aster is dressed in Kidane’s tunic and jodhpurs. Across her shoulders, the cape ripples in thick folds to hang below her knees. She is stubborn and straight-backed confronting Kidane with his sagging shoulders and bloodshot eyes. Their loud voices erupted not long after he returned late in the night, his presence dragging the cook and Hirut out of bed to serve a late meal. The cook sits beside her now, lazi
ly raking through a bowl of lentils while listening to the escalating tensions between the couple.
Take it off, he says. I told you that when I walked in.
It’s my right.
It’s my father’s cape. You can’t see his blood on it? Kidane’s mud-flecked shamma slides off one shoulder. I don’t have time for this, he says, I haven’t slept in days. And now this. He reaches for the clasp at the throat of the cape to take it off his wife. Give it to me.
I know whose it is, Aster says.
Berhe has tailored Kidane’s clothes for her. Beneath the cape, the tunic has been altered to fit across her slender shoulders, the sleeves have been shortened, and the seams and the hemline taken in. He has adjusted the trousers to curve against her calves before blossoming gently at the thighs, and now it cinches nicely around Aster’s small waist. The outfit molds to her figure gracefully, hinting at the soft lines of her body.
The cook puts down the bowl and wipes her hands on her dress. How long can they do this, she whispers, looking up at the tense couple. There’s so much to do.
They have already taken all the spices, beans, and grains out of storage and separated them into smaller bags. They have filled baskets with powders and leaves for infections and wounds. They have arranged the scarves and blankets brought by neighbors into loads light enough to carry. They have filled countless jugs of water for the march. The cook has made enough food to feed a large wedding party, but that will only last a few days. They have worked continually, but there are still decisions to be made over what remains behind and what Aster must resign to being stolen by bandits or the Italians.
It’s my father’s, Kidane repeats. You’ve already ruined my shirt and trousers. Take off the cape.
She has worn those clothes for the last five days, removing them only at night when she returned from wherever she went, keeping the cape at her feet while she slept in her black dress. It is difficult for Hirut to see clearly in the dark, but she knows that Aster has drawn kohl around her eyes as she has done each morning before leaving, and she knows that the woman has braided her growing hair into tight, flat rows.
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