The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

  Before she knows what he is doing, he digs his thumbs into the tender flesh of her lower back. It is an agony so ripe and cutting that a red blaze shoots through her back, up her head, and into her stomach. She cries out as he wraps an arm around her waist to keep her close and pushes again. The pain is dizzying, and she cannot breathe.

  In all your readings, you never figured this out? An old Roman trick to immobilize the enemy. He cups his mouth over the places he touched. None of your clever little books or lonely men taught you about this? He kneads into her with his fist.

  Her legs buckle. She slumps against him but he shoves her upright, refusing to let her go.

  Stop, she says. Her face is bloated with pain, her head throbs from an ache deeper than bone. It is a primal sensation.

  He lets her go and sits again on the bed. He pulls her to him. His fingers intertwine with hers. He kisses her wrists then pulls her head down and kisses her on the cheek. He taps her nose, a playful gesture suddenly frightening.

  I’ll always know more than you, he says, then he lies back on the bed and waits for her.

  ETTORE SHUTS THE DOOR SOFTLY BEHIND HIM AND SALUTES COLONEL Fucelli. You asked for me, sir?

  There is a charge in the room, a low, pulsing current that makes Ettore nervous. Fucelli is staring out the window, his back to Ettore. Two of his bodyguards stand at attention on either side of his desk. Two more are stationed at the door. Ettore knows that there are also ascari at each corner of the building, but it still does not explain the tension he feels stepping before the colonel.

  Fucelli spins around and motions for Ettore to sit; dark stubble shades his jawline and crawls down his neck. One side of his face is red, as if he has just woken up. Ettore sinks into the cold metal seat.

  The colonel slides a folder across the table. Look at this, he says.

  The folder is full of photographs of nude and seminude women. Italians and Turks. Greeks and French. Some others of unknown nationality made to look Arab. All the women are gazing into the camera suggestively. Their names are imprinted on the front: Belle, Giulietta, Divina, Nadia, Marie. Ettore stares at the small, crisp photos. They are studio photos, the chaise is the same in two and soft lighting gives some of the shots a dreamy quality. On the back of each is a tiny inscription: carte de visite.

  As a boy, I thought all women were the same, Colonel Fucelli says. He rests his chin in his hand. What a man knows about a woman is a sign of his maturity, don’t you think? I imagine your father didn’t teach you much about the subject. Am I right? he asks, staring steadily at Ettore.

  No sir, Ettore says, feeling color rise to his face. He shifts the strap of his bag higher on his shoulder.

  Fucelli takes the folder from him. He places the photographs four across and three down. He holds up one of a woman in a chaise wearing filmy white undergarments. Are the men still talking about Haile Selassie? he asks.

  They are, sir. Ettore nods.

  Go on.

  Some are afraid the two prisoners are part of an army of women. They say Haile Selassie even has female bodyguards. Ettore shakes his head, imitating Colonel Fucelli’s own expression of disbelief. They call them Amazons, sir. They think they’ve come to seduce and kill us and the ascari. They’re exaggerated stories, he adds. There’s no proof this is true. Then Ettore sits up straight and places his hands on his knees. He clears his throat.

  Fucelli holds his gaze. Most of these men are illiterate, soldato. They’re bound to believe in superstition. They’re scared of many things. He pauses. It’s interesting, you know, Fucelli continues. We fight other men, but we’re frightened of women.

  He pushes another photo toward Ettore. A bare-breasted woman lies back on a chaise with her hands behind her head. A silky sheet drapes over her stomach, discreetly covering her lower half. Does she scare you? the colonel asks.

  No, sir. Ettore smiles, but the tension has returned to the room.

  The men are starting to believe anything they hear about these Abyssinians. Fucelli folds his hands in front of him and leans forward. You know the story of Penthesilea. You’re more educated than most of them. He waves a hand toward the door.

  Ettore shifts in his seat and looks down at the picture. The one who fought against Achilles? But she was killed.

  But she fought well, and do any of these men think they’re Achilles? The colonel taps his forehead.

  But Achilles died later too, sir.

  What do you understand of what I’ve just said?

  Ettore shifts again, made uncomfortable by the echo of his father’s question. Our men are frightened of these Abyssinian women, he says slowly. They make up stories about them and believe them, he adds.

  Color is spreading across Fucelli’s cheeks. His ears are bright red. Go on.

  We think they’re so different from our women because we don’t know anything about them, he continues. This makes us scared, sir. Ettore pauses, unnerved by the colonel’s eagerness, his obvious interest in every word Ettore is saying.

  The men have to find a way to believe something else, Ettore says slowly. They have to believe they’re Achilles, the Achilles who lived to defeat his enemies.

  The colonel nods. They have to believe they’re Achilles, he repeats. His face is flushed, sweat has collected above his lip. Get your camera and get to work, Foto. Start with the prisoners, the younger one. You’re not photographing women, you’re creating Achilles. He begins putting the photos back into the envelope.

  Yes, sir. Ettore stands to leave.

  Oh, Navarra? The census is coming, arriving soon. When you complete yours, bring it to me. Understood? The colonel’s eyes are probing. I’m sure your father is having to do the same thing right now. He shakes his head and adds, A shame.

  Ettore nods quickly, too quickly, and can barely manage a salute before he turns and hurries out the door, gulping mouthfuls of air.

  ETTORE LEANS BACK against the tree on the outskirts of the plateau and stares at Hirut. He gazes across the flat spread of land leading to the prison and tries to comprehend what it means to wake every day behind barbed wire that knots around a sturdy fence. He unbuttons his shirt and untucks it, aching to take it off and strip himself free of this uniform, of its betrayals. He takes a breath, another, to calm himself. Just beyond the prison is the path to those treacherous cliffs, and he tries to imagine the first instant after the leap, that suspended moment before free fall. He shakes his legs to loosen their stiffness, to still the shivers he feels climbing up his chest and into his jaw. He wants to shout to Hirut and ask her how she does it, how she manages to stay in that jail, leaning against that wall as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be trapped.

  She has been staring listlessly toward the horizon, toward the wide crevice between the large boulders. She has not moved in the hours he has been there. Fucelli’s orders are to observe and document her for several days, but it is now midafternoon and there is still nothing to write. Overhead, the sun beams down from a merciless sky and makes it difficult to keep still and concentrate. Twice already, he has taken out his father’s letter to reread it. Ettore gets to his feet and shrugs his bag across his back. He drapes his camera around his neck to that Hirut will see it and be ready. A foul taste settles in his throat. He understands now why his father had been so angry when he enlisted in the army: Leo knew the true worth of a uniform, he had learned long ago how little it really protected. He knew that only those things most evident were seen: blood and birth and homeland.

  He walks toward her slowly, curving his mouth into a small smile. The guards draw in as he reaches the barbed-wire fence. He is a magnet tugging at the center of their orbit. They angle their rifles at Hirut’s chest and begin to take turns pivoting between the prison and the hills, newly alert. It happens without a word, choreographed to such an impeccable precision that Ettore feels a renewed awe for all that Colonel Fucelli has managed to achieve with his troops and all that he is promising to do for him.

  Indemine
sh, Ettore says to her. He sits down and crosses his legs directly in front of Hirut. How are you? Indeminesh?

  The question is nonsensical. The ferenj repeats himself again, then speaks a series of words that is an incomprehensible list, without context or introduction. Then his voice trails off, awkward and flat. Hirut stares at the horizon, rigid and upright. She has come out every morning since their capture to sit in this place against this wall and search for signs of Aklilu. She has forced herself not to move, not even to wipe sweat or wave aside a fly. There is nothing to do here, she has said to Aster each day, but be a soldier and continue training. And though Aster has only raised her head then laid back down again, still asking for Kidane, Hirut knows that to plan an escape means first understanding where to go.

  What she has learned: The ascari work in pairs and speak only in signals. They rotate every two days and have shifts of six hours each. They stagger their breaks and no two ever leave at the same time. They do not speak to the soldiers and laborers who trudge up and down the hill while they extend the road below. The two who guard the prison are men comfortable with killing, men who are made bored by the absence of violence. The other four find ways to sneak looks at her, sometimes curious and most often repulsed. All of them are cruel. All of them would shoot her if ordered to do so. She and Aster are not safe. The monotony of these days is temporary, a period of deceptive calm before a new terror takes its place. She must find a way to escape.

  Indeminesh? How are you? The ferenj tries again to pull her attention back to him.

  Hirut refuses to turn her head, refuses to do anything but stay vigilant in her search for a signal from Aklilu. The thought of him now forces her to sit straighter, she imagines he is beside her, urging her to stay strong. And she knows that with him is Seifu and somewhere, Kidane strides across those hills finding ways to come to Aster and set them free. There is Hailu and his quest to keep all the injured alive. There are Nardos and Abebech and all those women who ran beside her while charging down a hill. There is Minim and the emperor, those two held together in the body of one gentle man. There is Beniam and Dawit and Tariku and those countless others buried in unmarked graves. She can feel them gather around her and build a wall of themselves that keeps this ferenj’s bastardized Amharic and his dull gaze away from her. These Italians are machines draped in skin, devoid of emotion, of any intelligence that allows them to move through Ethiopia with anything but beastly cunning. Hyenas, Aster once called them, they move in packs and kill through deceit and one day they will eat themselves.

  This is why Hirut does not turn her head in the ferenj’s direction even when he says her name. She does not flinch when one of the ascari storms to the barbed-wire fence and threatens to beat her if she does not speak to the Italian. She does not change her breathing or stiffen her body or flail helplessly when that same ascaro yanks open the gate and bends into her face and shouts her name until it is a hard and painful blast in her ear. Instead, she looks up at his face, bloated with futile anger, and calmly waits for whatever comes next. Because this is one thing that neither the ascari nor Fucelli nor this stupid soldato staring at her with a gaping mouth will ever know: that she is Hirut, daughter of Fasil and Getey, feared guard of the Shadow King, and she is no longer afraid of what men can do to women like her.

  HE REPORTS EVERY MINUTE of his interaction to Fucelli and when the colonel says, Go back, Ettore goes back the next day and the next, and when he returns to tell Fucelli what is happening, the colonel nods as if he is not surprised and tells him to do it again.

  Keep talking, don’t stop just because she can’t fathom what you’re doing, Fucelli says. Imagine her like a beast to tame, a dumb and frightened dog. And then the colonel adds, The census has arrived in Africa, notice has come from Asmara.

  It is the fourth day and Hirut is still unresponsive. Aster is still inside the prison. His camera still hangs, unused and useless on his neck and the rolls of film that Colonel Fucelli has been expecting remain in his bag, unexposed. He knows the ascari have begun to mock him in their silent ways. He can feel their anger with Hirut shift to bafflement then frustration with him. He knows he is expected to force her into compliance, that he is to punish her insolence with greater force and more brutality than they ever could. He knows the soldati have heard of his hours spent in front of the girl testing his Amharic phrases, laying them before her like tender objects eager for her attention. He has learned different verbs to set in front of her, waiting for the one to make her move.

  To be. To sleep. To eat. To stand. To awaken. To serve. To cook. To clean.

  The list grows longer. The mockery behind him intensifies. The jokes around the campfire become more pointed. They do not understand how much changes as the eye grows accustomed to a thing. How the unfamiliar contours of a face can become a path into an inscrutable mind. What the mouth says has nothing to do with what someone means. It is the face that speaks. That he has not managed to see more than a resolute and stubborn girl is proof of the Ethiopian native’s unfamiliarity with all that he finds commonplace. She has no reference points that intersect with his: no myths or fables, no ideas on science or philosophy. She is unlearned and unschooled, illiterate and limited. Unknowing and thus, unknowable. She lacks the imaginative capacity to consider an existence beyond her frames of reference: these mountains, her village, the hut where she was born. What rests behind that face and in that mind are sturdy, thick thoughts of survival and routine, and nothing else.

  TO DIE, he finally thinks to say on the eighth day. He repeats the word again in Amharic then Italian. To die: memot: morire. He notices her hands tremble slightly in her lap. He goes on: I die. You die. We die. They die. Hirut, he says: They die, he repeats. They will die. Yimotalew. He feels his chest constrict.

  A space flickers open between them and even though she still refuses to turn in his direction, he sees how the words unwind something inside her that she struggles to keep contained. He sits straighter, tries to keep focused, to keep thoughts of the census away: Mail is arriving in a few days. Ettore raises his camera, leans back, and snaps a picture of her profile, those wet eyes, the sun glowing in a lush horizon that will be faded to black and white on film. He waits for her to move, to wave him aside so she can be left alone. He marvels momentarily at her discipline, that military rigidity that could rival any soldier’s. She blinks her eyes dry. She presses her back more firmly against the wall. She brings her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them. Then she goes back to that unnerving, stubborn stillness.

  He is not sure why he takes out the photograph of his parents on their wedding day. He keeps it next to Leo’s letter as if one offers a clue into the other. In the picture, his father is stern and somber in his black suit and crisp white shirt. He looks as if he is on his way to university, as if his time in the photo studio is a temporary pause in an otherwise busy day. Gabriella is dressed in a delicate white dress, the lace trim around her neck and wrists a tender spray across slender bones. Her dress drops elegantly at her waist and stops low on her slim frame. She is seated in a chair, back straight, chin ducked demurely, her eyes trailing to the side to catch a glimpse of her new husband. Leo leans one hand on the back of the chair as if it is support that he needs. As if he has come from a long journey and even on this day, his wedding day, he is tired. His father, Ettore notices for the first time, is much older than the four years they have always claimed stood between them. Looking at it now, he also sees his mother as a slightly startled, eager young woman, somewhat in love but more perplexed. His father is stoic and dutiful, and there is a haggardness around his eyes that lends him the air of a tortured poet.

  Ettore repeats the words again, softly almost to himself: To die. Memot.

  She looks down at the picture, then at him, then she grips her hands together and stares at the photo again. He feels the tension in her, how she coils into herself, so he points at his father and decides to confess in Italian the most truthful thing he can, because she
will never understand: This is how I hold my father still. This is how I stare at him without having to answer his questions. Ettore wants to add in Amharic: My parents could be dead. They might not be dead. But he is stopped short by vocabulary, by the conditional tense, by that way of speaking that shifts everything into the hypothetical, into an imagined existence that could or could not be true. Everything is possible at once. I could die. He could be dead. She might have died. We might die together.

  She knows that he is pointing to his dead father and asking her to feel pity for him. He is repeating the words in order to make her react, as if it is so simple. As if dying were not ordinary, as if a dead father were something only he has suffered in this world. She thinks of Beniam and Dawit and Tariku, and all those that this ferenj has helped to kill and leave orphaned and make childless. She thinks of her father and her mother and the Wujigra and Aster curled like a child inside the prison. She thinks of Kidane and those ways she would still be whole if only this war hadn’t started. If only these ferenj invaders hadn’t come. And as she counts the many ways so much has died and been split and been ruptured because of Italians like him, Hirut feels the fury rising in her, the taste so sour in her mouth that she is certain he will know how much she wants to reach through the barbed-wire fence and steal his rifle and point it at his arrogant and dulled heart. Innateinna abbate motewal, she whispers. My mother and father have died. She drops her head and has to blink away the tears. She stiffens to calm herself. She wraps her arms around her knees to shove the anger back inside of her until she can become immobile again: a soldier on guard, watching for a signal from her army.

  To die, he says. Except he does not know the correct way to say “I die.” He mispronounces “he dies,” and when he gets to “we die,” Hirut listens to him and she turns and says softly: We won’t die. And she watches him blink stupidly as if moved by the sound of her voice. Then she turns her head once more and gazes out into the horizon, searching for flashes of light as his camera clicks: tiny glass teeth chewing into the side of her face.