The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

  AND SO THIS IS WHY he stays at the canteen and waits for the daily truckload of prisoners. He wants to be amongst those who will give of themselves then spin like ash into oblivion. He will photograph them as they are suddenly made aware of their boundaries. He will search for himself in their twisted figures flailing and breaking in the plummet. Ettore pauses at the threshold of the road that climbs to the cliffs, waiting for the truck to inch its way up. The vehicle has rolled to a stop. It is idling, its engine protesting. The driver leans out and waves ahead of him, then tucks his head lazily back inside. It is only then that Ettore notices Fifi’s servant. She is blocking the truck’s advance and motioning with a basket in her hand as she walks forward. She ambles slowly, confidently, and nods to the driver. She slips a hand into the open window, then she goes to the back and settles the round, flat agelgil the natives carry onto the bumper.

  She takes out a bundle of leaves and distributes it quickly to the prisoners. She glances over her shoulder and when she sees Ettore, she angles to obstruct his view of her arm reaching again into the basket then into the tarp-covered truck bed. She moves so fast, it is difficult to tell exactly what she is doing. She pauses and looks around again, then turns and speaks urgently. She listens to something the prisoners are telling her. She nods. Then she walks away with her basket tucked in her arms. She does not look at Ettore. It is easy to assume she has said a prayer for them and let them say their confessions. But today, Ettore knows it’s something else, another breach in the natural order of things.

  THE COOK SLIPS a small pouch of powder wrapped in khat leaves to each of the prisoners. Get ready to be in constant touch with death, she says. You will die but do not give them your fear, she adds. Do not beg.

  The prisoners’ hands and legs are bound, but they press toward her as best as they can and stare terrified into the sunlit valley that expands past her shoulders. Every other day, there are at least five who arrive. They come between two and three in the afternoon. They’re driven up to the prison near the cliffs at precisely 3:30 p.m. They are photographed in front of the prison by 4:00 p.m. They are re-bound and cumbersome clothing is cut loose. They wait in the newly built prison until they are pushed off the cliff between five o’clock and five thirty, providing that soldato, Navarra, with the best light. All of this synchronized by the watches the ferenjoch love to obey. She has begun trying to prepare each truckload, hoping to move them away from naïve hope and into steady conviction.

  Eat this right away, she tells the new prisoners now. Chew it well and swallow so you become angels and learn to fly. She refuses to speak in a whisper even though she knows Navarra is watching; Fifi has bribed the driver and other guards.

  What she sees, peering into the back of that truck: men and boys, women and girls, all of them confused, all of them frightened, all of them unprepared to leap into the air when thrown.

  There is no escape, the cook says to them. But you can make a way to the other side. Take this, it’s astefaris and something else to take your mind far away. And she shoves an extra bundle toward them, biting her lip to stop the trembling.

  I’m dying for Ethiopia, one of the young men says.

  I did nothing wrong, why am I here? a girl adds.

  Tell my mother you saw me, they all plead.

  The cook shakes her head and stretches out a hand to settle it on the leg of the closest one, an elderly man quivering in his worn T-shirt. You’ll die needlessly, Abbaba, she says. You’ll die for no cause, because you are innocent, and they will not remember your name.

  She looks to the rest of them. But tell me who you are, she says. Tell me slowly and repeat it three times, and I will make sure you are known. I will make of you a remembrance worthy of this fall. Say your name to me now. Say your name as you are photographed. Say it as you leap into the air and learn to fly. Do not let them forget who they have killed.

  Then she ducks away and takes those names to Fifi, who will transcribe them into a ledger she has taken from Carlo Fucelli, and together, they will bury it in the ground in Fifi’s tent and slide the cot back on top and when the war ends, they will bring it out and speak the names, one by one.

  ETTORE WAITS UNTIL the cook disappears, then strides to the back of the truck. He raps his knuckle against the bumper to get the camionista’s attention. I’m just taking a look, he says.

  He sticks his head inside the canvas-covered bed, flinching at the sudden darkness, momentarily overwhelmed by the stench of sweat and wood, of dirt and dried blood. Ettore turns away: he has never looked directly at these prisoners. He has seen them only through the lens, and only for the purposes of arranging them in perfect light: their worth measurable in the balance of shadow and sharpness. He has found ways not to hear their pleas and curses as they pivot, poised like a dancer, on the edge of the cliff for that last picture, the final image very likely the only one they have ever taken in their life. Every photograph has become a broken oath with himself, a breach in the defenses he set up to ignore what he really is: an archivist of obscenities, a collector of terror, a witness to all that breaks skin and punctures resolve and leaves human beings dead.

  Staring into the truck with his father’s letter burning through his shirt pocket and into his heart, Ettore sees that thing that must give of itself, that bounded thing forced to acknowledge its own feeble existence. He feels a surge of pity for the prisoners looking back at him in confusion and despair. He wants to reach out and grasp the hand of the elderly man closest to him and find a way to explain that he means no real harm. The body is contained by its extremities, he wants to remind the old man. We are all made finite by our own nature. What will happen to you today is what happens to all of us in the end. You will break and fall but then you will owe no more to this world.

  My own rupture, he would add if he could be understood, has been a slow progressive fall to the bottom. It has been an endless descent that began with these words: Take a picture, soldato.

  Instead, Ettore stays quiet and wipes his brow, the heat bearing down as heavily as ever. He lets his eyes adjust: they are no different from all the others, men and women in a range of ages and a young boy clinging to his father’s hand. A hard kernel of light falls across the young boy’s shirt: it is covered in grass stains, as if he fell while running, as if he tripped on something and tumbled at full speed before his father could catch him. All of them are chewing something, mouths moving in slow synchronicity, teeth grinding down thoroughly before swallowing in healthy gulps.

  What’s that? he asks. He is surprised at the roughness in his voice, the way he so easily becomes that soldato that Fucelli wants. How natural it has been to swerve into cruelty. How effortless to be splintered by the headlines that declare every Jew an enemy and a spy. How easy it has been to read those booklets defending the prohibition against Jews owning businesses and even working in photography, then to unleash his helpless anger on those prisoners who trembled in front of him. How simple it has been for Colonel Carlo Fucelli to suggest that he does not belong here. That he might not be Italian. That obedience is his only hope.

  The father of the young boy points to his mouth and shrugs, eyes narrowing and starting to glaze. It’s medicine, he says.

  One of the women drops her head and smiles.

  The boy points to Ettore and shouts, Viva l’Italia! And his shoulders shake from suppressed laughter and the other prisoners join in.

  It is a sound that cuts into Ettore. He steps back, staggered by the indecency of it, by its vulgar ease. The prisoners wait for him to respond, watching in mockery and disdain, these pathetic creatures unaware yet of their destiny. What is the miracle of man if not this dark resolve in the face of horror? It would be simple to turn around and go back to his tent until it was time to climb up the hill and take their photographs. It would be simple to pretend today was a day like any other. But Ettore looks at the placid expressions, lets his eyes trail over their sluggish features, their dirty clothes, their unkempt hair, and what he
sees is a confirmation of something his father said long ago: There is no way but forward, my son. That is the only true escape.

  Photo

  A boy in a stained shirt rests his cheek against a tall boulder as if it were a father’s chest. He stares at the camera, doe-eyed and curious, his lips folded around a mouthful of food, a stream of words, a cry for help, a burst of laughter. One palm balances against the hard surface of stone, his finger raised and pointed ahead, the gesture an accusation and a plea for patience. His small heels dip over the plateau’s edge, his broad toes cling desperately to earth. What expands behind him is majestic and stupefying: a vast landscape of tall mountains and merciless rocks, a gaping ravine that drops out of view, breathtaking even in this frozen glimpse. His face: a blur of tender features: the shaking head moving faster than shutter speed, swinging left then right then left again in defiance and horror.

  What cannot be captured: that he repeats his name until that final free fall, Zerihun, Zerihun, Zerihun, and the ricochet of his voice is the earth’s mournful lament, land tempering its cruelty.

  THEY SAY THEIR NAMES and demand to know his. They drag themselves toward the threshold then collapse to the ground in mindless laughter. Light wavers around their sluggish figures: unsteady bodies sinking into haze. Ettore leans in, arches close, orders ascari to keep them still, but it is impossible to get a steady shot. The last push is desperate. It is a plea for normalcy, a return to control and command. The prisoners tip over the edge with soft bones, relieved and graceless, and all Ettore can photograph are awkward figures buckling into empty space, shouting their names into a gulf that multiplies their voices, a repetitive, deafening chorus. They spill over the edge as if gliding underwater, drowning and surging up for air, spinning between a rapturous dream and a paralyzing nightmare: ghastly shapes of unspeakable words: dark marks against the sky.

  YEARS FROM NOW, IN THAT PORT CITY CAFé IN ALEXANDRIA, ETTORE will explain to Khairallah Ali that nothing of his father’s life was really exposed in the letter that Ettore received. He will force himself to admit, when Khairallah Ali asks him about Leonardo Navarra, that he still does not know enough about him. My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers. Ettore will also confess, after a tense pause, that he sometimes wonders if there were more letters that never arrived to him, other letters from his father that were lost in transit. My father was a man of few words and many meanings, Ettore will also add. But I am sure there were other letters that would have told me more. He would not have asked so few questions.

  Ettore is partially correct: Leo Navarra did indeed write everything about himself to his son in many letters. In fact, Leo surprised himself and broke his silence to reveal every aspect of his existence to Ettore. He wrote himself into being. Both the past he had chosen to leave unspoken, and that other past left for dead. Leo wrote furiously. And in those moments when he wanted to shrink away and leave it all behind again, he kept on writing. When he was finished and could say no more without repetition, he packed those many letters into a box. Then he and Gabriella put it away and waited for Ettore’s return. It is this box that Khairallah Ali hands to Ettore in Alexandria so long after the war. It was delivered by a friend from Venice instructed to find the Egyptian journalist who might know the famed Italian photographer whose parents were taken by the Germans and sent first to Risiera di San Sabba and then on to Auschwitz. It is this box that Ettore opens and searches repeatedly for the other letters.

  Yet on the night that Leo was certain that it was indeed smoke that he smelled rising in his adopted country of Italy, he got out of bed, crept into Ettore’s room, and took out all of his letters from the box. He moved into the kitchen and pulled out a pair of scissors from a drawer. He waited until he could control his trembling. Then he held each piece of paper between the sharp silver blades and began to cut. He destroyed every last letter, thoroughly and meticulously, then swept the floor clean. He worked for hours, aware that Gabriella was in the doorway in her nightgown, crushed by grief. The next morning, he sat down and started a new letter. It was much simpler, more concise, more fitting of the man he now was. Then he put that letter addressed to his son into the mailbox and went to sleep until his dinner.

  This is why when Ettore sees his father’s letter in Ethiopia some part of him realizes he is looking at a broken man. He sees the evidence in the small, perfectly even script: Leo Navarro has tried to strip his handwriting of its usual flourishes and erase any emotion that might give too much of himself away. He has tried to rub himself out of his past again and leave only what is necessary inside the lines. Leo has also, in fact, left a final challenge for his son. He has hidden himself between the words, tucked in every space and margin, and he has written in such a way that he still manages to beg: to be found, to be rescued, and to be held up—for once—in the soft glow of tender light.

  A Brief History of Leonardo Navarra

  It was not that he knew all the things he could not say. It was not that he understood with ringing clarity those facts to be transmitted through inference, and those details that could only be shaped into sound. Leo Navarra, born Lev Naiman on 19 April of an indeterminate and quite ordinary year, was not ever sure that what he left unsaid deserved the honor of that treatment. Neither could he be certain that those things he chose to utter were better served by their vocalization. He had always been profoundly aware of the infinite distance between those two poles of expression. He had witnessed too many errors of omission and tactless inclusion in the talks between his parents. Their words, all those trapped in muted gestures and those hurled out of shouting mouths, hovered just at the periphery of his vision as a boy, waiting for him to stumble.

  On the day that Leo, born Lev Naiman to two exhausted parents in a tilted wooden house, learned to speak, his mother said his first words did not produce the usual noises of a new tongue practicing language. She insisted to friends that her young but intensely alert son, balanced on her left hip, looked into her face one bright day and simply said: We must all suffer our consequences.

  When Lev’s tired father, Maksim, came home one night to behold his son repeating those words, he sat down at their table, put his head in his hands, and mumbled: He was born in Izyum but it was once called Izyumchik and before that it was something else lost to his generation. He does not see that soil by another name is the same soil. He imagines that a word can alter a shape. But you must teach him, my beloved, that it is the land that carries our suffering when we die. It is the land that remains the same, no matter what we call ourselves. And what he meant, Lev would later learn, was this: that only soil will remember who we are, nothing but earth is strong enough to withstand the burden of memory. To become unknown, it is not enough to shift a name, one must go where the land has always been a stranger to those who share your blood.

  Lev Naiman; see also: Leonid Novsky; see also: Leonardo Navarra, husband to the lovely Anya (21 March 1881–19 October 1905), father to little Boris (25 November 1902–19 October 1905) whose last full day of life was spent sleeping in his terrified mother’s embrace while his father stumbled home from work, shouting for them through the fiery streets of Odessa, careening up the smoke-filled staircase until neither air nor word could escape from his mouth. Leo, father to Ettore, husband to Gabriella, proud Italian, eternal atheist, firm believer in facts and details, and holder of the unshakeable conviction that what is seen must also necessarily be true, wrote a letter to his only living son and pinned a half-hidden life on the page. He did so with a zealot’s assurance that it would be decoded and discovered. But that would not necessarily be the case, as Khairallah Ali realized sitting in that café in Alexandria with Ettore.

  THE ACT ITSELF IS MEANINGLESS, SUCH A SMALL THING, LIKE A FATHER setting a little boy on a tall stack of firewood and pulling out the bottom log. There is no sentimentality to the order Carlo Fucelli gives to Ibrahim: Get me that letter Navarra can’t seem to stop reading after two solid
weeks. Get it immediately and let me look at it before he knows it’s gone. It is what men do to those they command: they push and bend and wait to see how long before the boy finally breaks. They do it because they can. They do it because it makes the distracted boy malleable again, and impressively obedient. The photographs of the prisoners have not been coming in as regularly as they should. Ettore Navarra is not taking as many as he used to. The ascari are reporting that he spends his time leaning beside the thick-rooted tree that is some distance from the cliffs while they push the prisoners.

  Ibrahim delivers the letter to him in the middle of the night, thrusting it into his hand then waiting for him to finish reading. Carlo does not ask how he went into the Italian section without being detected. He trusts in Ibrahim’s skills, in his complete allegiance to every order. Carlo forces Ibrahim to wait as he reads it again and the effect is still the same: the sentences are clear, but the emotion slips out of his hold at each full stop, every new thought disintegrates by the time he arrives at the next comma. There is nothing here he can hold still and pin down to scrutinize. This is a letter where meaning rises to the surface in dim light, then disappears, an intimate message from a father to a son, from a father to himself.

  Carlo Fucelli sits down at his desk and pushes the letter aside. He picks up the urgent telegram announcing that a Luce News crew is arriving at the same time that intercepted messages reveal that Haile Selassie has ordered Kidane to ambush his camp. The Ethiopians will attack tomorrow, he is to allow the camera crew to film it all. Carlo rubs his eyes, deliberating on his next steps, astonished by his good luck. Finally, when Ibrahim coughs discreetly, he stops and hands Navarra’s letter back. Staring at the telegram again, Carlo finds himself strangely depleted of language, fatigued, as he nods to the man and hears him spin away, no more than a swoosh in the night.