Beneath the Lion's Gaze (37 page)

“A big rally today,” Emama Seble said. “Guddu’s making a new announcement. There’s lots of traffic. Yonas called, didn’t he? He was going to go shopping before coming home.”

Sara nodded. “He’s waiting until the roads are less crowded. He told me there are schoolchildren practicing marches.” She stopped. “He cries about Berhane. I hear him at night but he stops when he knows I’m awake.”

“You’ve told him?” the old woman asked.

Sara nodded. “He thought there was more between Dawit and me.”

“Who wouldn’t?” She glanced at Hailu. “No news?”

“Nothing yet.” Sara unwrapped a bandage around Hailu’s chest and laid new leaves on the wounds. They were healing, slowly.

Emama Seble touched his cheek. “He’s getting better. He’s fighting back.”

DAWIT STARED AT
the spectators in Revolution Square. People jostled each other and milled around. He felt the anticipation and tension in the air, the electric charge of too many bodies moving too quickly with little thought, and it made the wide-open space stifling. He turned to face Finfine River and the pale golden walls of what was once called Jubilee Palace, then looked towards the imposing Africa Hall, the shining dome of St. Estifanos Church, and settled his gaze on the trees around the square. He caught the glint of a sniper’s sunglasses
through
thin leaves. Soldiers flanked every corner, their ammunition belts strapped solidly across their chests and waists, eyes methodically roving past pedestrians and schoolchildren. They raked the horizon, paused at scattering groups of young people, furrowed their eyebrows at black-clad mothers, and ignored him. Dawit’s eyes were locked on a certain row high in the bleachers where two men dressed as soldiers sat far apart, legs crossed identically.

The
keberos
started, rolling steady drumbeats over the tempered whispers of civilians. The drummers slapped cowhide worn thin from years of use, and drilled cavernous beats into the echoing field. For a moment, people stopped their shuffling, soldiers paused mid-scan, and all eyes shifted to the young boys and girls bearing down wildly on their drums. An expectant gasp rose like a bubble to the sky. Dawit sensed what he knew everyone else sensed: that angels were speaking, reminding them that there were others also who shouted with them into the heavens. They were not alone.

A whistle blew outside, trilling screeches that broke the reverie. Children’s voices climbed into the sky, excited and shrill. The distant rumble of engines and thick tires grew louder. Military police marched towards the road in twos and threes and Dawit followed, a solitary figure walking in clipped steps towards the nearest exit.

“Don’t walk with them but stay close,” Solomon had told him. “You’ll stand at the intersection closest to the stadium and watch for the second-to-the-last Mercedes. Aim for the passengers. Keep shooting. Don’t stop, don’t worry about who else you hit. Run with the crowd.” Then he’d shaken his hand and gripped it tightly. “And if you get caught”—he’d slipped a tiny cyanide capsule into his palm. “Let the angels hear us today.”

The cavalcade moved at a crippling pace. The crowd was silent, transfixed by the oily sleekness of cars sliding over the road like a single black snake. Dawit slipped behind two women and looked around. All eyes were trained on the procession, mesmerized by the regal progress of the entourage. Schoolchildren broke the silence again with a song that praised Guddu’s latest triumphs against cowardly enemies. Drumbeats drove them on, their marching strides grew wider, their arms swung with wild exuberance. And despite the words, despite the
sickle
-and-star flags, despite the terror resting behind every spectator’s stare, the crowd could not help swaying to the exhilarating rush of being witness to such power and force.

From a corner across the street, Dawit saw Solomon, and behind him was Anbessa. Solomon nodded and walked into the crowd. Anbessa stepped forward, and Dawit thought he saw him wink and grin before carefully resting his rifle higher in his arm. There were five cars still remaining, then a row of soldiers, then the last two cars.

They came, one after the other, in certainty and calm. The soldiers went by, caught up in the fervor of an audience ordered to cheer and clap on the threat of death. The children shouted. The drums thudded, unstoppable. And Dawit imagined that even the trees bent and bowed from the momentum. Anbessa raised his rifle.

Dawit raised his own, scanned the last row of soldiers, made sure none looked his way. Then he released the safety and began to count.

The car slipped into view.

The driver was a crisply dressed chauffeur with a long nose and grim mouth. Then came the passengers in the backseat. Dawit slid his finger on the trigger and set the sights on the man closest to him. What he saw made him falter. Mickey: dazed, blinking rapidly, smiling benignly, waving blandly through the window. Dawit looked up quickly and saw Anbessa was intent on the car, his shoulders taut, all his concentration on the passengers, none on the soldier across the street from him pointing a rifle at an old friend, confusion rising and crashing against his stomach.

—a fat hand lifting him after a fight, the constant pushing up of black-framed glasses, the nervous smiles, the short breathy laughs that masked a calculating mind, the sweat, the obsessively ironed clothes, the stained uniform that cursed night that turned this friend inside out and upside down and then sent him back into Dawit’s life unrecognizable with a heart bludgeoned and cut to fit bite-sized into the mouth of a venomous monster this boy is no more a boy this man has never been a man, what has never been can it really be taken away?

Dawit angled the rifle against his shoulder. Before he heard the first bullet whirling through the air, he pulled the trigger and fired one shot after another, ignoring the women who dropped in front of him, then ran covering their heads. Children scattered. Soldiers fell. The
Mercedes
swerved, brakes squealed, Mickey slumped against the shattered window, holes drilled through his glasses. Dawit shot repeatedly, caught up in the magic of bullets roaring out of a cool polished barrel, exploding with sound, ricocheting off metal and bone. At the first empty click, he looked up, trapped in the tidal wave of panicking civilians, and walked quickly with them. He lost himself in their pressing bodies and became just another soldier trying to find a way out of the mayhem.

64.

ALL OF ADDIS
Ababa erupted in chaos. Doors were torn off hinges, sons pulled from homes and shot, daughters raped, men and women hanged in public squares. Thousands were herded to prisons where morbid cries and agonized pleas spiraled out of small dark rooms.

“The Red Terror!” the still-breathing Guddu declared in Revolution Square. “The Red Terror will break the backs of these enemies of the state! They have killed one more of our brave! They have tried to kill me once again! And again, they have failed!” He pounded on a podium in front of a new crowd of terrorized and shaking spectators and held up a bottle filled with water the color of blood. “We have recently eliminated the traitor Chairman Teferi Bante for his treasonous acts against the state,” he declared, ignoring the surprised gasp from the crowd. “From Nakfa to Assab, we will destroy every Eritrean rebel! All those who want to stop Ethiopia’s progress will be eliminated. We will not stop until the gutters flow with the blood of all our enemies! We will fight bourgeois White Terror with Red Terror! Until Ethiopian soil is soaked with their bones and flesh and cries, we will not stop! Death to our enemies! Death to our enemies! Death!” He raised the bottle higher and sent it crashing to the ground. Red-tinged shards of glass splintered and glistened in the sun. A thousand mothers and fathers sank to their knees and prayed. Young men and women braced themselves for a new onslaught of violence. And everywhere, everyone searched the heavens for signs that angels reigned, that they would listen and heed their calls for help.

As bodies piled on top of each other in city streets and public squares, as families stumbled over familiar corpses draped with signs that announced “Red Terror” in cooling blood, as mass graves grew, stories of Anbessa’s furious gun battles with the Derg’s rattled soldiers, always fought with Mekonnen and Solomon at his side, rippled through
homes
. The government’s search for the three men intensified. Week after week, special forces were sent into the highlands, ordered to burrow into caves and huts, destroy fields and farms, raze villages and climb to the bottom of watery wells. And still, they found nothing. It was as if, the people breathed, it was as if angels had made them invisible. Nightly, prayers were sent up for Anbessa destroyer of roadblocks, Mekonnen killer of soldiers, and Solomon the wise. The Holy Trinity, some dared to say, unafraid to blaspheme a deity who had long abandoned them.

65.

A TIRED MONK
shuffled in the deep purple dark of the cave, making room for Anbessa, Solomon, and Mekonnen. His long dusty robe brushed the ground as he bowed and made the sign of the cross in front of an altar of candles and a Bible, then sat on an old leather cushion.

“We have lived here for hundreds of years without any problems. You are safe,” he said. “They cannot climb this mountain without this.” In his hands was a long, thick rope.

Solomon crouched at the entrance of the narrow cave, squinting into the sun and looking down into the valley far below them. Tall trees below the steep, rocky incline blocked them from view, leaves letting in only fragmented threads of daylight.

“They’re looking specifically for Mekonnen,” Solomon said, pointing to Dawit. He turned to the monk. “Is there somewhere else he can go if we need to separate?”

“We are many here,” the monk said, nodding. “They don’t know we exist, we’re forgotten.”

Dawit stood behind Solomon and stared into the gaping mouth of the bright valley as a raw, sharp wind howled past them. A small, freshly dug grave rose under the wide shadows of a tree far below, surrounded by wilted
meskel
flowers.

“A child is buried there. The mother comes every day and sleeps next to the grave before curfew,” the monk said. He looked at Dawit. “He promised us no more floods, but I pray every day for a deluge to wash this all away.”

Dawit looked at the man, bent and dignified, and recognized a soft-spoken rage and unshakable loyalty. He dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around the old monk’s legs. “I have done so much,” he said. Longing for his home and his family, for his old life and his old friends surged through him.

“Mekonnen.” The monk laid a hand on his head. “Don’t we serve
the
God of the warrior King Dawit, that killer of beasts and giants, that appointed slayer of husbands and fathers and the virile sons of weeping mothers? Did our Father not make this Dawit his most beloved, the seed for his own Son? Did he not add strength to his swinging sword? Didn’t he put a murderer’s rage into his beloved’s heart himself?” He made the sign of the cross on Dawit’s crown. His voice was tinged with the resolve of the faithful. “My child, Ethiopia, stand up and fight against this new beast that has descended on our country. I will pray for you nothing but blessings, for eyes that see in the night and legs that carry you far and fast, for a life long and peaceful, for children who will not rest until our country is free again.”

HAILU WOKE, PULLED
out of sleep by the startling light of the sun. It was in the quick jerk of his legs that he understood his body had begun to heal itself, that all this time, while he swayed in dulled intellect and sharpened fear, it had been knitting and patching nerves and muscles. His body was adjusting to an existence without pain. I have swallowed my own teeth, have had nowhere to spew my own refuse, and nearly starved with a stomach full of only guilt and fear. Hailu stared at his legs, at the slight tremor he could not control in his hands, and in the mirror he traced the side of his mouth that would never be fully un-numbed. But the body heals in due course, he thought, and one day soon, I will sleep free of these dreams and uncontrollable spasms I have witnessed in the dying who long to give up. I will live free of all this, far from those days of stench and electricity and probing hands. I will live. The girl. What have I done? Hailu stared once more at his healing legs, his strengthening hands, the mending body of an old man, and he began to weep.

YONAS WATCHED FROM
the window of the prayer room, forced his eyes to distinguish the figure that crouched, then sprang inside Melaku’s kiosk in one lithe leap. He tried to mold his gaze to the contours of the dim light that flickered, then shut off inside the kiosk, but there was no moonlight. He turned and began to pray.

He heard a familiar sound. It was a soft knock followed by rocks
thrown
against glass. Yonas was taken back to boyhood days when he and his brother hid from each other, from Mickey, from their parents, from a disgruntled Bizu. It had been his little brother’s game more than his, but one he joined in with grudging enjoyment. The rocks came again, a splatter of taps against the window.

Yonas moved swiftly and quietly down the stairs to the small side door. He unlatched the lock and flung his arms wide and let his brother fall into him and he held him firmly, Dawit’s soft weeping the only sound separating the tall men who clung so desperately to each other they were nearly indistinguishable in the dark.

“You’re home,” Yonas said. “You’re home.”

“I’m in danger,” Dawit said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

Yonas nodded. “You’ll be safe here. I won’t let them find you,” he said under the shelter of their father’s house.

DAWIT GASPED AT
the sight of his father. “Abbaye,” he said, trying to break through the fog in his father’s mind and find the man. “Hailu.” He held his father’s hand. “I’m here.”

Hailu brought Dawit’s hand to his mouth to kiss it, then turned away.

“He’s usually more alert and much stronger,” Sara said. She touched the pillow next to Hailu’s head. “He’s been crying.” She raised his head and felt underneath. “It’s soaked. Let me change this. Abbaye, what’s wrong?”