We stretched on the ground and looked to the fast-moving clouds. The coolness of shaded grass refreshed the backs of our legs and arms. I plucked the green strands and tossed a handful in the air.
“Why do they always go after the students?” I asked.
“You heard? The university is to be shut down,” said Tezze. “The schools, too. All schools. Christian and Muslim.”
“No school?” said Ishi. I could hear the joy in his voice.
“I saw it in the national newspaper,” said Tezze. “No classes tomorrow. Or any day after that.”
* * *
◆
Our fear became normal. It became a way of living, to not think about what might happen next. Tezze was head to head with Gashe most evenings, learning techniques for accounting and investments. Ishi tended the animals, and I helped with Etheye’s growing business, filling small containers with fresh milk and passing them to neighbors through the gate. We played football and fought over injera. We studied at home. We went to sleep.
For us, nothing changed. At least, not at first.
Gashe arrived by sunset on most nights, and when he did not appear for a few days, no one worried. Gashe was no one, a simple businessman.
“If we remain within our walls. If we remain silent, it is as if we have given them our permission to do as they please,” he explained as we drove through unfamiliar streets.
A military vehicle was ahead, parked to the side of the road. Near it were two armed soldiers dressed in army fatigues and wearing reflective sunglasses. A soldier stepped in front of the car ahead of us. Stance wide, face grim, both hands on the gun, tip pointed down but at the ready.
The Lada stopped. It had a dent in the rear fender and was missing the passenger-side mirror.
An officer leaned on the driver’s side, left hand on the roof, right one at his hip near a holstered gun. He peered through the open window, looked around. He checked papers and slipped the birr hidden within the folds of the documents into his front pocket. He nodded, shouted, “Clear,” and slapped the roof. The Lada rolled forward.
Gashe lifted his hand briefly, showing his palm as we approached the checkpoint. The soldier waved through the gleaming Peugeot.
“Have you ever been stopped, Gashe?”
“No.” He shook his head and glanced at me. “They will not stop me.”
“Why?”
“They know who I am. They know this car.”
But if they knew the car and they knew who was in it, would it not be a target?
I did not speak this fear. If Gashe said we were safe, we were safe. Still, I wished I was at home helping Tezze with the accounting, or milking the goats with Ishi.
Or, better yet, I wished I was at school filling my head with knowledge, getting simple answers to all of my questions.
I needed to know one thing.
“Is it dangerous, Gashe, what you are doing?”
“It is dangerous to cross the street,” he said.
“But what if someone hears what you say?”
“I want people to hear what I say.” We drove for a time in silence.
“What if someone reports you?”
“The buildings have ears. The streets have mouths. It is certain I have been reported,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I must follow the path God has set.”
“But the danger …” I gulped, not wanting to say the next words.
“It is more dangerous not to speak,” he said. He reached across the space between us, then, and gripped my shoulder. “Do not fear. I have connections. Partners in business. The students I have sponsored. Their families. I am safe. You are safe.”
“But, Gashe, aren’t you breaking the law?”
“If we will not stand for our country, who will? There must be change. There must be democracy.”
“But Ethiopia is a democratic republic, isn’t it?”
“It is what they tell the world. But tell me this, what true democracy has only one party? What democracy, where people have the right to choose, wins a one hundred percent majority? Can you tell me that?”
We were leaving the city behind, moving into new territory.
“I don’t like what you are doing.”
“And so, you would make me a coward?”
“There must be another way,” I said.
“I have fought silently my whole life, Tesfaye. I have seen a monarchy, communism and countless revolutions promising change. Nothing has changed in my lifetime.
“We will fight, not with guns and grenades, but with knowledge. We will make the outside world care as much for Ethiopia as it did during the years of the Great Famine.”
The meetings were illegal. I knew that. We all knew the laws that prohibited gatherings, but sometimes, Gashe explained, you had to think of who was making the laws. If corrupt people were making laws to suit themselves and you broke those laws by doing what was right …
“We must get together and we must discuss,” he said. “The edire is our only way to share information.”
He said the meetings of the elders were too important not to attend. Holding them in Addis was too perilous, and so it was decided to hold them in the smaller cities outside of the capital, where they would be less likely to raise suspicion.
My breath was shallow the day we drove farther from Addis than I had ever been and rolled beneath the tall gate that framed the entrance to Dire Dawa. But I was excited to be part of something daring. I was also sure that if Gashe was arrested, Isaias would set him free.
13
It was near to sunset when I kicked my sneakers into the air — one, then the other — letting them skew the neat rows of my brothers’ and sisters’ shoes on the veranda, and not bothering to straighten them. The cold marble refreshed my steaming feet. I was out of breath, tired, but still fired with the excitement that came from flying through the streets of Addis in the back of a pickup, like a wild bandit on the run. I was a valiant rebel who could defy the rules and elude the police. It was a powerful feeling that caused my heart to pump hard and my chest to swell. I could hardly wait to tell Ishi of the excitement he had missed by tending to his beloved Fiyeli and the garden.
No one was outside. The house was in darkness, not a single light from lamp or lantern. And no noise from inside. The door handle needed oil, as did the hinges that screeched when I swung open the door.
Etheye rushed at me.
“Praise be to God!” she said. She squeezed my upper arms and kissed me on each cheek. “Praise God! My son, you be safe!”
Her eyes were crazed with terror. Her grip like the talons of a hawk.
“Gashe is taken!” she said. “You must leave. You be next!” She turned me to face the door and reached for the handle.
“What are you saying?”
“They arrested everyone. At the meeting. All of them. Go!”
“But I wasn’t at the meeting. I was just giving out papers.”
“Why you do this? How you be involved?” Tears flooded her face as she banged her hand flat on my chest. “Why?”
Why was Etheye acting in this irrational way? I had not attended meetings or spoken on street corners. I was a kid, a student at the Cathedral School, a protected son without a thought of politics in his head. Etheye was mistaken.
“Forgive me for being late. I was with my new friends.” My new, older friends from the university. I was the youngest son at the edire.
“You sons,” Gashe had said, looking up from the lists he had made of names and home villages. “You will take those boxes of papers back to the city and distribute them.” The papers on the floor in front of him looked like the ones I had given out after his speeches. Normal paper. Cut in half. The words in Amharic.
“Divide into sections. Stay together in small groups
, but do not be seen,” he warned.
We were glad to be released from the shuttered house, stuffy with the breath of far too many people. They came, parched and dusty, from all parts of the country, to tell of missing husbands, children in jail and lives of fear.
“My husband, he be a good man. He be taken. Now, how my children live?” a woman wailed.
“My son, tied to a tree. Killed with a bullet in the head.”
“All the young men, herded like cattle. Taken. On the night of the second moon.”
We ran, all of us sons, for the pickup, the older boys fighting over who would sit in the cab. Another boy and I sat in the back. We didn’t pass the papers one to each person as I had on the street corner. We grabbed handfuls from the box, leapt from the bed of the truck and shoved them at the first people we saw. I tucked one in my pocket for Ishi. Back on the pickup, we sped away. To bus stations, the Mercato, dropping them into the open windows of taxis. Anywhere! Someone had the idea to leave the open box in the back. The colored pages fluttered like leaves torn from their branches during a storm.
No one knew who we were. We were nameless, faceless boys. None of us had taken the time even to read what was written on the pages.
“Everything is fine. I have done nothing wrong,” I told Etheye. She shoved me toward the door.
“They know who be there. At the edire. They make a list.” I had been there only a short time.
“But how?”
She scurried around the room with the rapid, nervous movements of an animal seeking escape from a trap.
“Your friends be in danger, too. Do not delay! Get! Out of here, before the police come.” She ran to the window, lifting the edge of the curtains to peer outside.
“Isaias,” I said. The first name on my lips. My beloved elephant. He was the government. He would protect us. “Call him!”
Etheye’s agitated movements stopped as if I had thrown a bucket of cold water at her. Her eyes were steady for a moment.
“He be gone, too,” she whispered. “Even Isaias who be only half Amhara. Like you. You must go!”
Isaias was gone?
Not possible.
Etheye snatched the telephone on the first ring. I had to check my room and Gashe’s. Make sure there were no papers to incriminate him.
“Yes. Yes,” she said, then hung up.
Etheye seized my arm when I tried to move past. Her eyes drilled into mine. “The brother of Gashe be coming. He take you.”
“Take me? Where?”
Etheye scurried to the window. “Praise God that Kofi arrives before the police.”
The telephone trilled. We both startled. She spoke swiftly in a low tone. Her eyes were sad and worried when she turned to me.
“Obadiah be gone. Daniel be gone. Moza be picked up.”
How did she know the names of my new friends from the university?
“This cannot be right. There must be a mistake,” I said. “We were together.”
The buzzer rang from the gate.
“He be here! Go! Go now!” Her eyes were as crazed as an animal whose throat has not been cut all the way through.
“Etheye …” I said.
“Go!” She pushed me out the door.
Kofi’s car was outside the gate. Engine running. A tall man with muscled arms unfolded from the back door of the sedan. I crawled in beside a man in the traditional dress of an elder. He was slumped against the door, his eyes bugged out, forehead sweating. His cheek bulged on one side. A thin line of green spit drooled down his chin. His hands fidgeted, and he muttered unintelligibly.
My uncle glanced in the rear-view mirror. He peeled away as soon as the door shut, the tires squealing on the pavement the way they did in American movies.
He did not say Selam, and neither did I. Kofi leaned into the steering wheel, his knuckles tight. I had never seen him like this. He was always dignified and proper.
The big-shouldered man beside me had the sharp smell of sweat. His eyes scanned the streets, as did mine. He spoke so fast his words blended almost to nonsense as he told Kofi which roads to take, where police might be stationed, who would accept bribes. My uncle shot through the streets, tipping us this way and that, paying no attention to signs that said Slow or Stop. There were few vehicles on the road at this time of day, mostly mini-bus taxis all driving fast, trying to get to where they were going before the sun vanished into darkness. Special Forces police trucks waited at intersections, not moving, not chasing anyone. Just grim-faced men in uniform, arms folded over their chests, the lower half of them leaning on vehicles. Waiting.
A fourth man was in the front passenger seat next to Kofi. Like the stinking man beside me, he also had big arms and blurted directions. Rapidly, like an exchange of gunfire from automatic weapons, they argued loudly over the best route.
Kofi veered abruptly onto a rutted street without pavement and without streetlights. He dimmed his headlights as night took hold. Clouds of dust rolled behind and beside us as Kofi sped like a madman, swerving to avoid other vehicles and gaping potholes.
I sighed deeply when we stopped. I hadn’t realized I had been holding my breath.
The guard beside me opened his door even before my uncle cut the engine.
“Come!” he said and beckoned to me. Kofi got out, too.
I recognized nothing. The three of us walked to a cement building that appeared by its size to be a warehouse. There were two large doors at its center, a small door on one end, and a tiny window, high up, laced with barbed wire.
Goats and sheep bleated softly near one side of the building where they seemed to be feeding. Frogs chirped in the cool air. A goat with an ear that flopped over one eye trotted toward me and nuzzled my leg with short horns. I patted the top of its head, then followed Kofi through the wide wooden doors.
Open sacks of grain, their tops rolled down as they were in the Mercato, sat in one corner. Behind them were stacked piles of bulging cloth bags stitched closed. A worker with an old scar on his forehead and a sightless eye made little clouds of dust with the broom he passed over the floor. He bowed slightly before us. Our shoes, I noticed, left tracks of clean, the opposite of the mud that sometimes made Etheye yell when we didn’t remove our sneakers.
“You will stay here,” Kofi told me. “It is the house of a cousin.”
I nodded as if I had a choice. We passed through another door into a storeroom with a very tall ceiling that was filled along its edges with more sacks of grain. Some of the bags were stamped with a red banner that said Canada and showed a small flag of that country. The men in the storeroom glanced up, nodded to my uncle and returned to their tasks. Some were seated on the floor playing cards. Some rubbed oily rags over guns. Some slept on sacks. None of them wore shoes.
Kofi used a silver key on a ring to unlock a thick steel door. Inside was a house alive with children, all younger than me and all of them with shaved heads. They stared at me in sudden silence, as if they had never seen a boy before. Kofi spoke to the cousin’s wife, then dropped his hand heavily on my shoulder.
“You will be safe here for now. Until I think of something else. You understand?” he asked. “No one will look for you here.”
The woman showed me where I would sleep. It was the main room, but there was no upholstered sofa, chairs or low tables. Just stained mattresses outlining the floor. She led me to another door that released an overpowering stench of human excrement when she opened it. She pulled a string that dangled from the ceiling. A bare bulb glared. Truly, not a toilet, just a hole cut in the cement floor. Visible waste that did not drain. Flies buzzed in the air and crawled on the walls. Nowhere to wash.
I hoped Kofi thought of a new plan quickly.
All of the children piled and squirmed onto the mattresses, jumping around and rolling and showing off. The mattress crunched when I sat on the edge. Bits of s
traw poked through my jeans. Rather than sleep beneath the cowhide, I lay on top fully clothed — jeans, jacket and shirt — and studied the thick cobwebs that draped from the ceiling. A small girl, with the same smoky eyes of her mother, rubbed her hands over my hair, kissed my face and, before I could protest, snuggled beside me.
* * *
◆
I itched like a dog with fleas the next morning. Had I really slept? My neck felt like a giant, raw welt, as did the tender skin behind my ears and at my ankles. I tore at my skin, but nothing would stop the itch. Bedbugs had had a feeding frenzy with me as their meal. I was glad Ishi was not here to laugh at how I must look.
I was roused more fully by the smells of cooking. The woman brought a platter piled with eggs, bread and rounds of fried potatoes.
“For you,” she said. “Come.” She spoke to me in Amharic, but her accent made it sound like a different language.
I sat on a low stool as Gashe did when he ate. One by one, the children gathered to sit at my feet and watch. It was difficult to enjoy the meal with so many eyes following every movement of my hand to my mouth. I held out the platter to offer some to the children. They snatched it with small greedy fingers, stuffing the food into their mouths with the speed of hungry salamanders.
“No! No! No!” their mother yelled, shooing the children. “For him. Only for him! Be gone! Be gone!”
But would these children eat? Or was it the same as it was at home, that Gashe and his guests ate first, and we had what was left?
“I have had enough,” I said. I rubbed my stomach to show it was full. “The rest, it can be for them.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You eat. You too thin.”
But not, I noticed, as thin as Kofi’s cousin’s wife, who had a row of horizontal bones visible across her chest, and arms that looked like those of a skeleton.
“Too much,” I said.
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