Beneath the Lion's Gaze (15 page)

—

THE WHISTLING SOUNDED
like the distant siren of an oncoming train that night. It was hollow, thin, and the rapid tap of the soldier’s rifle as he walked the hall mimicked the rattle of worn rails. Something wasn’t right; Emperor Haile Selassie could feel it. There was too much noise coming from outside. Inside, it was too still and every sound magnified relentlessly. Even his faithful lion Tojo, who usually whined outside his window, did nothing but jump and claw at his cage. It had been quiet since Major Guddu had ordered the emperor’s family and friends into trucks that roared away into the night, but this was different. This was the silence of a muffled scream, a strained soundlessness.

This is why it didn’t surprise the emperor when he heard the whistling suddenly die down, the rifle suddenly stop tapping, the guard’s steps slow, then come to a halt. This is why it didn’t surprise the emperor when he heard the guard snap to attention, then spit out, “Major Guddu, good evening.” It didn’t unnerve him to hear footsteps make their way towards the large room that was his cell, nor did it make him shiver, the way it normally would, to hear the jangling of keys, then the creak of his door opening.

What did surprise him was the young boy Major Guddu had brought with him. A fat boy stuffed into a military uniform much too tight for him, wearing glasses that rested on a flat nose. A poor woman’s son, the emperor could tell by the look of him. Another one of those who’d joined the military in hopes of steady, increasing pay, and instead found themselves at the mercy of an uncontrollable beast. The boy shuffled in behind the major and stood with his back against the wall. He blinked so fast the emperor was sure he’d soon squeeze out tears. The boy didn’t look at him, and the emperor suspected it wasn’t respect that pushed the boy’s head into the creases of his fleshy neck. It was fear.

Major Guddu thrust a hand behind the boy and shoved him forward. He flashed a pearl-handled pistol, and it was then that the emperor began to shiver. It was General Amman’s pistol, a gift he’d given to the war hero during the 1964 conflict with Somalia. So even this friend, the bravest, was dead.

“Mickey. Do it,” the major ordered the boy.

The boy named Mickey flung himself back against the wall, away from the pistol, and stood there again, blinking.

If he hadn’t seen the pistol, the emperor would have thought that time had run backwards and he was reliving the last few moments before the brandishing of the weapon. The boy was standing, quivering chin in neck. The major’s hand was positioned in the thick of the boy’s back, ready once again to shove. But from down the hall, the soft slide of leather-soled shoes floated into the room and the emperor knew this was a brand-new moment and everything that happened from now on would happen only once.

The emperor didn’t understand the significance of the bloodied plastic bag the major waved in front of Mickey, but he could understand the terror that wrapped around the boy’s face. It was a fear stripped naked of pretense, pure. He’d seen it in grown men only on the field, and usually it was replaced by a veil of courage that guided most to their inevitable fate. But this, this was the look of a boy not yet a man, of a boy who might never fully become a man and who now found himself exposed in the worst, most terrifying way.

The major held the plastic bag and the gun in front of Mickey. “You or him,” he said. “Remember your friend Daniel.”

Mickey seemed to glance at the window above the emperor’s bed, contemplating escape. And the emperor felt as if he himself was witness to a macabre pantomime, a silent play in which he was both curious audience and reluctant star.

Mickey looked at the pistol. “No.”

The major slipped the plastic bag over Mickey’s head and tucked the mouth of the gun inside the plastic, against the thick vein pulsing on the boy’s neck. Then the major stepped so close to the soldier’s fat, heaving chest that the emperor considered the possibility that this was all a dream and the two had merged into a double-headed demon.

It wasn’t until the major jerked his hand back that the emperor realized Mickey had knocked the gun onto the floor. And it wasn’t until Mickey ripped the bag off his head and sank to his knees in prayer that the emperor realized the major had moved to his bed and was looking down at
him
, his own pillow in hand.

It couldn’t have been his voice that said, “What has taken three
thousand
years to build can’t be destroyed in one night.” But he didn’t know who else could have said it.

And it couldn’t have been he who looked at the cowardly fat boy and said, “Be a man, watch this.” But it was his mouth moving, though the rest of his body was as still as a statue.

It could have been that the whistling was also in his imagination. That it actually didn’t get louder, that the major’s footsteps didn’t shuffle to his bed, that Mickey didn’t actually say, “How can you? He is the emperor.” The emperor wasn’t sure of anything anymore, and he told himself that it wasn’t a pillow pushing against his face, flattening him to the mattress, pressing down so hard on him that he could feel the bedsprings. He told himself it was Angel Gabriel, come down to bear witness. He convinced himself that the soft feather that floated out from a tear in the pillow was proof that angels existed and legion were helping him right now, easing the pain of airless lungs. And it all happened so quickly, so quietly, so effortlessly, that Emperor Haile Selassie believed that it was all a dream, just another act in the silent play, and the heavy sleep that engulfed him was due to nothing more than an old man’s fatigue.

PART TWO

Mother of the strong boy, tighten the belt around your waist
.

Your son is for the vultures only
,

Not for burial by your relatives
.

—
E
THIOPIAN WAR SONG

BOOK TWO

26.

HE WAS NEARLY
three years a widower now. He’d lived through thirty months of loneliness in a churning city. He’d grown weary in those months of jeeps and uniforms, marches and forced assemblies; his patience worn thin from the constant pressure to mold his everyday activities around a midnight curfew. He’d had to contend with identity cards and new currency, a new anthem and even a new flag. He’d come to detest Radio Addis Ababa and Ethiopian Television and the announcements of the arrests and even executions of intellectuals and city leaders, and increasingly, students. His daily commute was punctuated by a constant stream of propaganda posters with star-and-sickle emblems and large-fisted, determined workers. Pictures of Guddu were everywhere. Communism had couched itself comfortably in a country that once boasted of a Solomonic monarchy.

This morning, in the dry heat of another arid day, Hailu tried his best to shrug off his restless agitation and ignore the caw of newspaper boys that broke above the blaze of moving traffic:

“Defense Ministry Prepares for Cuban Officials!”

“Soviet Friendship Stronger Than Ever!”

Soviet friendship and Communist sentiment had helped nationalize his hospital, had helped strip it of its name, Prince Mekonnen Hospital, and impose a new one, Black Lion Hospital. The Derg had imposed itself on his work and passion, turned it into a wasteland of haughty Soviet interns and underserved Ethiopian patients. The few doctors who hadn’t fled or had been excused from the war against Eritrea and Somalia were overworked; medicine was in such demand it had become a luxury. He had tried to defy one of those Russians by insisting in writing that his performance would be jeopardized by the introduction of new medical theories. “We are Ethiopians and have always done things the Ethiopian way,” he wrote. “I have healed and taken care of some of you and your family,” he told the nameless, faceless officials who’d
ordered
these changes in his hospital. “I have trained with the best in Africa and Europe,” he reminded them. He’d received notice two weeks later that his floor and his staff would remain unchanged.

Hailu sat in his car on Churchill Road and watched the newspaper sellers. He wondered which of these too-thin, ragged boys carried anti- government pamphlets tucked between the pages of their newspapers. These sheets of paper were printed in dark printshops in the dead of night, then furiously distributed into the streets, dropped on doorsteps, and thrown into office buildings and into car windows overnight. They blanketed Addis Ababa’s roadsides, benches, and tables.

“Castro Praises Ethiopia’s Progress! North Korea Donates Uniforms!” the boys cried, a shrill chorus in the blue dawn haze.

One lanky boy motioned in Hailu’s direction, raising a newspaper like a flag. Hailu shook his head and tried to push thoughts of Dawit away. His youngest son had made an absolute break from his influence, had become so entrenched in his secret meetings and whispered phone calls that nothing Hailu did could bring him back into the family fold.

Intermittent car horns melted into a long, sustained blare. Buses and trucks dodged the boys. Irritated pedestrians brushed against blue-and-white taxicabs. It was crowded as usual. Everything was noisy. Sound traveled from car to pedestrian to pack animal, rising and falling over the hilly street. Aged trees dotted the roadside and drank in the cacophony. Ethiopia would remain, despite all outside influences, a mix of ancient and modern, progress and ritual sitting as uncomfortably next to each other as Communist ideals and Coptic beliefs.

“Anarchists Jailed for Threats to State!” the boys called out. Several drivers waved from car windows, eager to read this latest development. Hailu saw one boy slide a sheet of paper into a newspaper as he approached a truck.

Dawit, too, passed these raging pamphlets from doorstep to outstretched hand, though he denied this when asked, unconcerned that his ink-stained palms exposed him as a liar. Hailu shifted into gear and drove towards the hospital, rolling the window up to dampen the boys’ voices. His son was no different from the thousands dissatisfied in Addis Ababa. Like so many, he hadn’t returned to his classes once schools reopened, choosing to spend his time protesting the Derg. Resistance was the growing murmur amongst the young and the agitated.

In the beginning, the Derg had promised the people a “bloodless coup,” yet had done nothing but prove its own viciousness and murderous spirit. Though benevolent declarations and benedictions filtered out of its headquarters in Menelik Palace, the people no longer trusted the military regime. No one believed the announcement that the emperor had died from natural causes. It was a known secret that the mounds of dirt on the outskirts of the city were mass graves. And those gun battles—rapid-fire volleys between soldiers and fighters—were unrelenting proof of a growing rebellion. There was noise everywhere, and not even a curfew could stuff the silence back into Ethiopia’s nights.

Hailu could see the silhouette of Black Lion Hospital ahead of him. He tried to focus on the building’s façade, steer himself away from the Tiglachin Memorial that was now planted in front of the building. The monument was an elongated semblance of a lion shaped like an obelisk, topped by a red star, a stone nova that snaked its way to the sky. It was a five-pointed testament to Major Guddu’s new military prowess, strengthened by Russian and Cuban military support. Ethiopia had fallen victim to the Cold War scramble for the Horn of Africa.

The red star greeted Hailu every morning from his office window, its sharp points cutting into dense fog. It was thrust atop a metal pole, and that pole jutted from the concrete slab that climbed its way higher with a precision that was frightening. In front of it was a statue of young soldiers standing with a flag, also topped by the star, draped behind them. One soldier had a rifle raised, still strong and ready after battle. The red star, as bright as a spilled drop of blood, cast its shadow over a hospital that was no longer a familiar place. This monument was, thought Hailu, a distorted obelisk, an emasculated memorial to one man’s growing rage against his own people.

EVER SINCE THE
Russians had come into his hospital, he’d stopped using the front entrance. Most of them looked at Ethiopians with the same disdain his people felt for them. They had come into his country and begun to help destroy it. He didn’t want to see them, or be seen, didn’t want to go through the motions of professional camaraderie and respect when he felt none. He chose instead to go directly from
the
parking lot to the stairwell that led to the intensive care unit on his floor.

Once inside, Hailu moved through the silent corridor with clipped steps, conscious of the sharp echoes trailing him as he walked to his office. Everything in this building sounded more hollow, more cavernous and empty lately. Some of his colleagues used to think it strange that he found comfort in these four walls, and he’d try to explain it wasn’t the presence of illness he focused on, but the possibility of life. Now, there was nothing. He’d barely sat down at his desk when Almaz knocked on his door, a stain across her normally immaculate uniform.

“There’s a new patient,” Almaz said. She remained in the hall, an old habit she refused to break.

“Come in,” he said. He swiveled to push a thick book upright on the shelf. Like everything else in his office, his shelves were organized, his medical books neatly ordered by size. Nothing was out of place and all unnecessary files and notes were put away daily. The bareness of this small space comforted him.

“There’s a new patient,” she repeated. “A girl.”

Light streamed through the windows in a long bright strip, a pale red glow seeped onto the floor from the star outside. Hailu closed the curtains.

“And?” he asked. He straightened a pile of papers and readjusted a paperweight.

“It’s not normal.” Almaz was as efficient with her words as with her actions. She was his best nurse, the most reliable under pressure, to see her worried was cause enough for him to worry.

Hailu sighed. He wanted to ask her what was normal these days. “You should be used to things by now,” he reminded her.