Beneath the Lion's Gaze (35 page)

They laughed.

Hailu scraped his signature across the page; ink blots and smudges spotted his palm as he dragged it along.

The soldier put the signed paper into a folder and handed it to a comrade. He lifted Hailu by the elbow. “What did you say to him?” he asked, patting the bald spot on the top of his head. “How could he let you go after you killed his daughter?”

Hailu couldn’t hear above the buzzing in his ears. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, his head down, waiting to be led to the
Colonel
. He was pulled towards the front door instead, then prodded from behind. At the door, he was handed his suitcase, now empty, and pushed out, blinking wildly in the chilly fresh air. The door shut and locked.

He stood still, dry-mouthed, waiting for soldiers to fling the door open and drag him back. He waited for the mocking laughs and taunts at his gullibility. He waited until he stopped shaking, until his legs steadied, until a thought sank in and became solid: he was free. Free. There was no warning, there would be no ceremony, but he was free. He could walk down this road and, with each step, become just another man wading through his day, time constricted to twenty-four hours once again. Minutes neatly divided into segments guided by the sun.

Hailu squinted against the dropping light. He took a step down the dusty ribbon of road that would lead him home and shifted the empty suitcase in his hand. He looked over his shoulder at the square gray jail and searched the landscape for soldiers. He waited unbearable minutes for the Colonel’s commanding stride to grow increasingly louder. There was nothing.

He glanced around him. Eyes were on him, peering from distant hills, and shuttered windows, from calibrated military binoculars. Ethiopia had become a country of watchers. He imagined the figure he made: a lone man with a battered suitcase, staggering over rocks and potholes. There was the momentary thought that he was a vulgar and frightening sight. He was close to naked, his trousers cut and torn, holes revealing parts of him indecently. But the thought evaporated in the cloudiness of a dulled and bruised mind. He didn’t care. All modesty had disappeared during the interrogations. The Colonel had turned him into nothing but a mass of damaged nerves and soft bones. He’d been repeatedly stripped of all inhibition, one indignity after another. He didn’t care that his clothes exposed every part of his emaciated figure. He didn’t care that this warm palm of sunshine was part of his world again. He didn’t care about any of it.

If he’d had the same heart he was born with, he’d have wondered about Yonas and the guilt he knew his son carried. He’d have considered what he’d say to Tizita, how he’d explain where he’d been and why. And he’d have weighed his words with Dawit, chosen only the kindest. But no thought entered his head; no emotion nudged his heart into existence
again
. He moved mechanically, dragging one leg in front of the other and letting that momentum pull him towards the next step. He searched the space his body lurched through for Selam, some hint that she was with him, but there was only the sound of small rocks snapping and crackling under his bruised and beaten feet.

PEOPLE STOPPED TO STARE,
groups separated wordlessly to let him through. The air stilled around his head and above him, a bird’s song snapped in half and crumbled into silence. Hailu had the appearance of a man dragging death with him through life—a Lazarus damned. His back curved deeply, his stomach caved inward. His skin hung loose, tucking and folding where once there had been flesh and fat.

A woman approached him, a cup in her hand, her eyes moving over the length of him, then modestly turning away. “Abbaye,” she offered. “Drink some water.”

Her voice sounded rich and pure, as clean and gentle as a spring. It made tears well in his eyes and he swallowed them to quench the dryness in his throat. He continued walking, afraid to reach for the cup in case the momentum hurled him to the ground. The woman brought the water to his mouth and tenderly cupped the back of his head, steadying him for a sip.

“I’ll walk with you, just open your mouth,” she said.

Hailu obeyed, long since unable to resist any command. The water flowed down his throat in a rush, it flooded his stomach and the coolness of it, the complete pureness of its taste, startled him. There was nothing in this water but its brilliant, shining, sweet wetness.

He felt the woman take his arm. She slid her
shamma
off her shoulders and wrapped it around his. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Home,” he said. His voice sounded dry and brittle, thin. “Home,” he said again.

She held his arm closer to her side. They walked until she could go no further. “I’ll get reported if I don’t go to
kebele
,” she said. “Walk with God.”

She released him and Hailu felt like a startled bird flung into the sky. His head spun from the renewed imbalance in his steps and he stumbled forward, staggering into the next lonely step. He groped the empty
space
in front of him for something, anything, to guide him onward, straight-backed and dignified, to his front door, but he was met with the sound of leaves, empty of their birdsongs, shivering in the wind.

THERE WAS A KNOCK
at the door.

“Go get it, Tizzie,” Sara said. “It’s probably Emama Seble.”

Tizita charged out of the kitchen and bounded through the living room. She stopped at Abbaye’s red radio, quiet and dusty, and kissed the front of it as she secretly did every time she passed by. Then she listened at the door to make sure soldiers weren’t at the other side.

“How do you know if they’re there?” she’d asked her best friend at school, Rahel. Rahel’s brother had been taken from their house at night by soldiers who knocked first.

Rahel had tilted her head knowingly. “They smell like goats.”

Tizita stood by the door now and pressed her nose against it. She smelled something bad. Rahel told her if you didn’t open the door the soldiers would take everyone. She opened the door, holding her nose.

His eyes were far back in his face and his slack mouth revealed yellow teeth. Two were missing in front and his tongue licked between the spaces like a thirsty dog. His face was hammered in on the sides, his nose was crooked and big and swollen. There was wild hair in patches across his jaws and pimply, bumpy skin in the pale naked pockets.

Her nose burned, her eyes stung, her throat hurt. She stepped back and began to shut the door.

“Tizzie,” the man said. “Tizzie?”

She looked at the man’s skinny arms and saw scabs and scratches and black burned holes, and knew she was staring at one of the ghosts people said Emama Seble talked to. She slammed the door, scared, and ran back to her mother.

SARA’S SCREAM WAS
formed in the friction between horror and elation. She stood at the threshold of the doorway transfixed by the image of the man she saw shivering in the sun, his mouth opening and closing around air. She screamed again, clutched her heart, and stepped back from the door.

“Sara,” he said, standing still, afraid, it seemed, to move without instruction. A rotting tree stripped of roots, drained of water and sun.

“Abbaye,” she cried, holding her arms out even as he stayed grounded in place. “It’s you,” she said, reassuring both of them. Ululations flew from her mouth, their shrill shivering tempered by raw grief. She swallowed, tried to stop the tears, but her throat shook the cries loose, released the loneliness and fear that had begun long before Abbaye’s arrest, that had been planted at the death of her own father. “You’re home.”

“Who is it?” Tizita asked. She’d stiffened rigid as a board.

“It’s me, Tizzie.” He began to sway, his body finally buckling, toppled by the little girl’s fears.

“My father. My father.” Yonas dropped next to them. “Abbaye.”

Hailu leaned solidly against Sara, a heavy stone. Sara sank to the ground and held him across her lap. He moaned and his decaying breath floated to her face.

59.

—THERE. THERE. OVER
there. A speck of dust floats on an angry wind and settles in the wet eyes of a man with a mouth open to the moon. He crouches in his military uniform, wild-eyed and haggard on barren earth, his eyes dirty pools of light. There the Colonel stands on the edge of a hillside road, above a dimmed city, and marvels at the thickness of the black night. On a hilltop high above Addis Ababa, he sheds his uniform, Colonel no more, naked to the wind. He stands, tender-skinned and bent-backed, a grieving father with clouds in his eyes. There on a lonely hillside, stars bend to a sudden wail. Trees sway to the shivering in his heaving chest. A startled owl blinks at the dull thump of bullet spinning through skull bone.

60.

THE RIFLE WAS
his arm, attached to the rhythm in his chest, hot and heavy and solid against his shoulder. Dawit aimed and shot and hit the target, heard the boom and bang of cracking wood, felt the ringing in his ears, smelled the sharp tang of lead, understood the power and charge of a thing both deadly and seductive, loaded again. Birds scattered overhead, a distant herder’s whistle rose and dropped in the startling quiet of gun smoke and sweat.

“Much better,” Solomon said, standing next to him, cotton shoved in his ears, a grudging smile on his lips. “I’m surprised.” He slapped him on the shoulder. “Enough for one day. Let’s go back.”

Dawit sighed gratefully. A deep tiredness had set in. “I have to go home,” he said. “Lily’s already left for Cuba and I don’t know anything about my family.”

“We have to wait until they find a new anarchist to chase. It won’t be long, they’ve been arresting everyone.”

“Because of me?” Dawit asked. He grew agitated. “What if they punish my father? I have to go.”

“Slow down,” Solomon said. “Your father’s home.”

Dawit dropped the rifle. “I have to go.” He grabbed his jacket from the ground. “I have to see him.”

Solomon blocked his way. “Stop,” he said. He pushed him back. “That’s your problem, you don’t listen.”

Dawit tried to walk around him. “I need to make sure he’s all right. What if they come back for him?” he said.

“Do you think he’ll be safer with you in the house?” Solomon asked, pushing him back again, then resting a hand on his chest. “The Colonel had him released, then killed himself. An old farmer found his body.”

“The Colonel?” Dawit staggered backwards. “The famous one?” He’d read about this man in his history class.

Solomon nodded. “The same Colonel, one of our greatest war
heroes
, had his own daughter arrested, a high school student. She was helping us pass out pamphlets at school. I heard he wanted to scare her, teach her a lesson, but she got into the wrong hands. Bureaucratic error.”

“What does that have to do with Abbaye?” Dawit asked.

“They took her to Black Lion Hospital, the interrogators and soldiers involved. They didn’t want the Colonel to find out. Girma was the one who questioned her.”

Dawit took a sharp breath. Everyone knew of Girma the Butcher, the handsome, elegant man who worked with a human-sized plastic bag over his victims. Few made it out alive. Those who did, it was said, were the unlucky ones.

“My father treated her?” Dawit asked. “He was taking care of her?”

Solomon nodded. “They say he killed her himself, gave her poison so she wouldn’t go back to jail.” He watched Dawit’s expression closely. “You didn’t know?”

“We don’t talk,” he said. “He doesn’t talk to me.”

Solomon looked sad. “Girma was planning to threaten her into keeping her mouth shut, then send her back home to the Colonel, healed and obedient, and earn himself a promotion.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “She was friends with my little sister.”

“How do you know all this?” Dawit asked.

“Girma told us. He was trying to flee the country and not so cooperative, but after a few nights of”—Solomon paused—“talks with us, he told us everything.”

“Where is he now?” Dawit asked.

“He was hit by a car right after we released him. Unfortunate.”

Dawit shook his head, dizzy with information. He still felt his father’s disapproval, even from this chasm they found between them. “He never told me.”

DUST FLOATED IN
the strip of sunlight angling across the bed, the trajectory of their movement testimony to the day’s passing hours. Hailu lay in Dawit’s room, and tried to break minutes and seconds into their smallest increments, into that perfect moment just before the brain recognized pain.

“You disappeared again,” Sara said as she brought a spoonful of porridge to his mouth. “Eat. It’s not too hot.” She smiled with the tenderness of a new mother.

Cigarette smoke slid up his nose. Hailu turned away, afraid to stare at the Colonel. Dawit had yet to visit him, no one had spoken his name. He looked up and found the Colonel leaning into the shooting pains that clawed at his throat.

“Just a little.” Sara nudged the spoon against his closed lips.

Tizita ran into the room, making him jerk.

“Tizita!” Sara said. “I told you not to run in here.” She patted his shoulder.

Tizita patted his legs, unaware that she was hitting on places where wires had been attached. He moaned.

“Stop touching him.” Sara slapped her hand away. “He’s still healing.”

“Where did he come from?” she asked.

“I told you,” Sara said. “From prison. He was there for a long time. That’s why he’s like this.”

Tizita crept closer to Hailu. With a shy finger, she traced the outline of a closed cut above his eyebrow. “Does that hurt?”

Hailu stayed still, reminded himself that the Colonel wasn’t coming.

“I think he likes that,” Sara said. “He usually pulls away.”

Hailu closed his eyes and let her voice drift above his head.

“I’m sure your teeth will grow back,” Tizita said. “Mine did.” She paused. “I think he’s dreaming again, Emaye. His legs are running.”

61.

THE KIOSK WAS
sheltered from intruding eyes by the black blanket Melaku draped over the shutters. Dawit let his eyes roam through the dim light. Robel stood in front of him, his feet shuffling on the dirt floor. The boy was small for his age. Dust and chunks of dried mud filled the creases between his toes. He wore no shoes and his ankles stuck out jaggedly at the ends of bony legs that dangled out of shorts too large for him. His faded shirt was stained and exposed a flat belly. His thick eyebrows nearly met in the middle.