The Bay of Foxes (4 page)

He is too polite to ask the source of this good fortune, but clearly it troubles him. He mumbles something about money not having any real importance where friendship is concerned.

They eat sautéed spinach, salad, bread, and the stewed lamb, with the spicy sauce that brings tears to Dawit’s eyes, all served on a large platter, which the women put down in the center of the table so that everyone can help themselves. They dip into the platter with their fingers and mop up the sauce with the bread. They drink cheap red wine, which Asfa brings out in honor of the meal and of what he calls Dawit’s newfound fortune. No one questions Dawit about the source of the money, though they eye him suspiciously.

Clearly they cannot imagine such a sum of money appearing suddenly in a legitimate fashion. Asfa makes various circumlocutions about the value of integrity and the importance of freedom, and his wife tells him he talks too much. Dawit smiles but says nothing about his meeting with M., which is already beginning to seem like a dream. They all sit huddled around the kitchen table, talking and laughing over the stained linoleum cloth, while the children crawl around on the scuffed floor under the table. Everyone is delighted.

Dawit picks up the youngest boy, little Takla, who is crying again. The child seems to have difficulty catching his breath. Dawit dances him on his knee, and the child stops his wailing, but his breath still comes in small, desperate gasps. He looks up at Dawit with his enormous dark eyes, which look
still larger in his pinched face. The little boy’s only garment is a tattered shirt. Dawit wipes away the boy’s tears with his paper napkin and wonders what will become of him in this strange, sunless country. He feeds the little boy from the big bunch of grapes, opening each one to extract the pips before passing it to him, watching the child savor the sweet black fruit with pleasure and ask for “More! More! More!” which seems to be the only word he knows. The very walls of this place seem to echo with his cry.

On his arrival here, Dawit had been shocked at the squalid, cramped quarters, these degrading conditions, with only one filthy, malodorous, and eternally overflowing toilet. When it was flushed, the water would jump up high and splash the user, if it functioned at all. It was impossible to wash properly without going to the public baths. The windows leaked, the rain seeping into the ill-lit, filthy hallways. What bothered him above all was the constant noise, the impossibility of a moment alone, a moment of silence. Now he has the possibility of leaving this sordid place behind, perhaps of helping his friends, as well.

Despite the copious meal he has eaten, for the first time in years he is unable to sleep that night in the cramped room he shares with the others who have found shelter here. They have so little space to sleep in they have to turn together. They are not much better than the people in the prison cells in his country that many of them have fled. He lies without a sheet over him, fully dressed, his small stock of underwear and clean socks, his few books, all his earthly goods bundled under his head for a pillow. Uncomfortably, he listens to the stertorous breathing of the others around him, the coughing,
an occasional dream-cry in the night, and wonders if M. will really take him in, a strange Ethiopian. Will she reconsider and turn him away? He is afraid she may have been drunk, though she did not seem drunk to him. Had the
menthe verte
gone to her head? Perhaps she will have forgotten her encounter with him completely by the time he arrives? And if she lets him in, what will she expect of him in return? What is the quid pro quo here, and is it something he can provide?

W
HEN HE FINALLY FALLS ASLEEP, HE DREAMS A TERRIBLE
dream. Often his dreams are so close to memories they wake him up, rather than allowing him to sleep. In this one he is back in prison. Perhaps because of his father’s prominence, they had isolated him, and he had the privilege of being alone in his cell with the cockroaches and rats. There he had come to forget even the sound of his own voice, for though he chanted all the poetry he knew by heart, and all the psalms and prayers, and sang aloud the hymns, his voice came to him as if from someone else. He had the impression they had split him in two with their instruments: he was both Dawit and a stranger who lay curled up, weeping and beating his fists against the rough concrete wall. With the silence, the light that worked only randomly, and the ceiling so low he could not fully stand, they had reduced him to madness. Every sound terrified him: the screams and whispers from beyond his walls. With every footstep he was convinced someone was coming to take him to his death. Lions, hyenas, and jackals, snakes and spiders, lurked in the corner of his cell, ready to pounce on him and devour him.

He did not know how long he had been there, only that there was no way to distinguish one day from the next. There
were no windows, and the lightbulb that hung in a net in the low ceiling went on and off according to the whims of the faulty electricity. The food and water, too, came sporadically and in varying quantities. Sometimes he slept, but mostly he lay there chanting all the poems he had ever learned.

There was a big, burly guard who particularly enjoyed tormenting him. He had noted differences among his torturers: there were those who carried out orders without any particular pleasure. But there were others who enjoyed the work and accomplished their tasks with particular inventiveness. They took an obvious pleasure in creating as much pain as possible. This guard was one of the latter. Probably he had been taught to think of Dawit as a corrupt and spoiled member of the ruling classes, an arrogant adolescent playing at politics in the student organization he had joined. The guard called him an “aristocratic anarchist” and mocked him for causing his own downfall. “An easy target,” the guard told him, and laughed. It was a fertile line of reasoning. He had indeed been critical of the old regime. He had seen its abuses up close, the infighting, the promotion of people without talent, the graft. The guard had used all the usual means to induce him to betray his comrades, yet there was always a small part of Dawit that escaped, something that enabled him to remove himself to the mansion of his childhood, the cool, high-ceilinged rooms, the scented garden, his friend Solo’s arms. Possibly the guard sensed this, and it spurred him on. Someone must have been determined to keep Dawit alive and in solitary confinement indefinitely, if he had not been lucky one afternoon. The miracle M. had spoken of in the café did occur.

A new guard opened the door and came in, sliding the rusted can with the dry bread and urine-tainted water across the cement floor. A beam of light entered the cell. Dawit’s vision was blurred, and the edges of the pallet where he lay seeped into the hazy tips of the guard’s stub-toed boots. It was the sharp creases of his new starched trousers, the sudden scent of lemongrass, the thick-meshed black eyelashes that brought it all back: the ragged but ironed shorts and the carefully stitched T-shirt, the long, slim limbs, the slight body disappearing fast into a loquat tree. Solomon. He almost said his nickname. Solo. He lifted his blurred gaze toward him—just a moment of communication, a stare that made the undulating lines in his world spin in the gust of clean air and light entering suddenly from beyond the cell walls.

For a moment he thought he was hallucinating, lying there, hands and legs attached to a heavy chain, his body nothing but bruised flesh and swollen joints.

Dawit had grown up with Solo, the son of one of the palace servants. All Dawit’s childhood memories were inextricably linked to him. They had made slingshots together from elastic bands and wooden handles and hunted doves, cuckoos, and cranes at dusk in the freedom of that vast garden; they had climbed trees, picked loquats, half naked. They had hiked together in the hills around Harar, which they had been warned were dangerous. Solo had been his first love—there was no other word for it. He had never forgotten how Solo would come to him in the dark of night, slipping into his room and holding him fiercely, sleeping by his side, their limbs entwined.

Nor had Solo forgotten Dawit.

When the door closed again, Dawit pulled apart the lump of hard bread and was not surprised to find the sharp file. It took him hours and hours, shackled as he was, and constantly fearing someone might come to drag him out, as they did periodically, but eventually, desperation making him suddenly strong and persistent, he was able to free first his hands and then his ankles from their shackles. He stood partly up, for the first time in months without his chains, leaning against the wall and waiting for the door to open.

He is not really sure if he is dreaming or remembering, but he repeatedly replays the film of the moment the young guard came into his cell at dawn: he leans trembling against the wall, listening to the thick military boots stomping along the corridor; he sees himself behind the door as it swings open, holding the chain that had shackled him in his hands.

He had hoped it would be the guard who had tormented him so viciously, which as it turned out it was not. Perhaps it made no difference which guard it was at that moment. As with a sexual encounter, it is probably the first time that you remember best. He sees the guard’s surprised stare as he catches sight of Dawit behind the door. There was no time to hesitate. He recalled the names of warriors his father had told him about, Aregay, Merid, Amaha, Alemayehou. He watches again and again, strangely distanced from himself, yet remembering how feeble he felt, his arms and his legs weak so that he could hardly stand, as he threw the chain around the guard’s neck and pulled as hard as he could, suddenly filled with a rush of strength. He watched as the guard lifted his hands, searching desperately to free himself, gasping for breath, his eyes protruding from his flat face. He listened to
the final throttled cry that came from the guard’s swollen lips. At that moment Dawit was able to close his eyes and to conjure up all the rage he had stored in his wounded body over those months of helpless captivity. Every insult and indignity, every torment, was avenged in that moment of violence.

He held on for longer than was necessary or prudent, squeezing every bit of breath and life out of the body. The guard wore a khaki cap that fell back from his head, exposing his dark hair and black eyes. Then Dawit let the body slip down onto the cement floor, though he was not completely sure the guard was dead. He kicked him a couple of times in the groin, where they had put the electrodes that had made him jerk and burn and freeze at the same time, making his body split apart. He had recalled the old method of pulling a body apart with horses; this was more efficient; they had split his mind and body irreparably.

He pulled first the shirt and then the trousers from the guard’s body. Quickly he pulled off his own filthy clothes and donned the starched, clean uniform, tucking in the shirt and pulling in the belt to hold the trousers up on his emaciated form. He angled the cap down over his eyes. He pulled on the heavy boots, loosened the keys from the belt, and made his way quietly down the narrow corridor, retracing the steps that had first led him there.

In his dream he sees the filthy, empty corridor with no sign of life, the same concrete walls. His knees almost buckle under him as he walks, and he puts his hands against the walls to steady himself. He glances around fearfully, but luck is with him: no one comes. He is tempted to unlock the five cell doors he passes on his right, where he sees no sign of light or
life. He wants to free the other prisoners but realizes none of them would make their way to safety. Instead, fumbling, he finds the key to the door that leads into the courtyard and steps out into the first light of day. The other guards, crossing the courtyard, pay no attention to him. They came and went so frequently that a strange face could pass undetected. He is able to walk unhindered through the heavy door, out of the concrete building, into the dry patch of earth, the flat land all around. He makes way his way through the staring crowd at the entrance, all those relatives waiting for news of their loved ones. They are like shades in hell. He walks away from them, going through the parking lot with its military jeeps, trucks, and cars. He notices an old Volkswagen, where he sees three people sitting waiting in the dawn light. He goes down the narrow, dusty thread of a street that no longer seems real to him, finding his way. He takes off the cap and throws it onto the ground. He staggers onward. He is free: a rootless tree, an irremediably truncated tree, a tree without sustenance, but free nonetheless.