Beneath the Lion's Gaze (2 page)

In the corridor of the ICU, a smooth-faced soldier no older than Dawit sat in a chair outside a room cleaning his nails with the edge of a faded button on his shirt. An old gun, dull and scratched, leaned against the wall next to him. The soldier glanced up as Hailu walked by, then turned his attention back to his nails. He chewed on a finger, then spit bits of calloused skin on the floor.

2.

AS MUSIC PULSED
from his father’s radio, Dawit danced, lost in the throaty breaths of a singer. He spun round and round, twisted and turned, shaking his broad shoulders like a bird preparing for flight. He leapt in the cramped space of his bedroom, a slender body hurling itself up, defying the pull of his own weight. He gripped an invisible spear, his heart galloped in his chest. The song had just begun but he was already spent. The first steps of his dance had started earlier, in the deadening silence that had descended on the house after his father’s phone call from the hospital saying he was coming home and they would all visit his mother that night. She was no better. Those last words had sent his older brother Yonas to the prayer room, and Dawit to his room.

The day after his mother had been hospitalized, neighbors had arrived at their door to pray and visit with the family. His father had rejected their condolences. “She’s on the best medication,” his father said. “She’ll be home soon. And we’re praying for her.”

“But you shouldn’t bear this alone. It’s not good for you or your family,” the neighbors had protested. “We love Selam, let us come in and pray with you.” They tried to walk through the door and Hailu had resisted, his sons watching in stunned silence from the living room.

“Thank you,” his father said. “It isn’t necessary. We have each other.” He had shut the door softly and turned back to them, grief fresh in his face. He’d wanted to say something, Dawit sensed it in the way his eyes lingered on each of them, but he shook his head instead and sat down in his chair.

It was the lost way his father looked at his hands that made Dawit reach across the small table and cover them with his own. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made such a gesture towards his father, but on that day, in that quiet living room, Dawit ached for a parent’s touch and he wanted that look out of his father’s eyes.

“Abbaye,” Dawit said, his voice shaking, his loneliness so sharp it made his chest ache, “I miss her.”

It was the first time he’d ever seen his father collapse from the weight of emotion. He took Dawit’s hand in both of his, cradled it to his face, and called Selam’s name again and again, speaking into Dawit’s palm. The display of sorrow had forced Yonas to turn away, then get up and leave the room.

His mother had taught him to dance
eskesta
, had spent hours and days with him in front of a mirror making him practice the controlled shiver of shoulders and torso that made up the traditional Ethiopian dance. The body has to move when the heart doesn’t think it can, she’d said. She lifted his arm, clenched his fist around an imaginary weapon, and straightened his back. My father danced before going to battle; the heart follows the body. Dance with all your might, dance. She’d burst into laughter, clapping enthusiastically to Dawit’s awkward attempts to move as fast as she was. You’re like a butterfly, he told her, breathless from exertion. He’d reached out and laid a hand on her fluttering shoulders. He’d been eight years old and his adoration for her loving, gentle face smiling into his made him rush to her and hug her tightly.

The dancing lessons had begun after Dawit flung himself at his older brother one day. He’d kicked the much bigger boy with such pointed vengeance that Yonas had stumbled back, dazed, then fallen over completely, his hands still at his side. Selam’s response had been swift and decisive. In two simple movements, she warded Hailu’s blow away from Dawit and dragged the screaming boy up the stairs and into the master bedroom. She’d held his shaking body, letting Dawit’s tears soak into her dress as she patted his back and hummed his favorite lullaby. Then, without a word, she started clapping, her hands and feet moving to a silent rhythm that seeped into Dawit and soon enveloped them both. Like this, she commanded, bringing her hands to her hips and moving her shoulders up and down. Like this. Now faster. Don’t think, move the way your heart wants you to move, ignore the body. Let the muscles go. There is no room for anger in our dances, pretend you are water and flow over your own bones. His tears stopped, his attention focused on his movement.

These days, Dawit was forced to stay in the confines of his father’s house each night. It was Hailu’s attempt to stop him from attending
meetings
where students planned their demonstrations against the palace. The tensions between them were drawn tighter lately. Only dancing seemed to ease his agitation. He felt trapped in his small bedroom, in his large house that spoke, if nothing else, of his father’s dominion over the family. There would be another rally tomorrow afternoon. He was determined to go, no matter his father’s orders, despite his promise to his mother to stay away from all political activity.

Dawit could hear his father in the living room, walking towards the stairwell. He wondered if he only imagined footsteps hesitating in front of his bedroom door. He kept on dancing. He whirled, his arms flung wide, extended wings in search of a rhythm to send him up, away from the reality of a house without his mother.

One day, Emaye, my mother, I will put water into my bones and dance until my heart obeys. Dawit spun, eyes wide open to take in the slowly darkening sun.

A FAINT MELODY
slid from Dawit’s room into the living room where Hailu was resting, and threw him back to the days of his youth, when his and Selam’s families had gathered inside his grandfather’s
tukul
and drunk honey wine in celebration of the new couple’s impending first child. His cousin’s
washint
had filled the small hut with tunes of love and patriotism, the hollow reed instrument needling a plaintive voice into the revelry. She had been seventeen; he, an arrogant twenty-eight- year-old with an awkwardness around this girl who sometimes looked at him with childish mockery. I am your husband, he’d told her, sitting on the steps of her father’s house, and I will remain faithful to you even while in medical school in England. She’d grown quiet, unimpressed by his chivalry.

You’ll be changed when you come back, she’d said. Will you let me leave if I want? Will you let me come back to my father’s house if I ask? Will you ever keep me against my will, as my father once kept my mother? And he’d sworn to her then that he would let her go, that he would never force her to stay with him. It was this promise, however, that Selam reminded him of last week, and it was this promise that he knew he could never keep.

Seven days ago, Selam had clung to his hand as she pushed words
out
with shallow breaths. There is this. This. It is silent and I am alone. This. She was shaken and weak, panicked to find herself back in the hospital room she’d been discharged from only weeks before. Hailu promised her then that there would be no more attempts to nurse her back to health, that he would finally obey her wish to be allowed to rest, that he would become, in the moment when she was her sickest, her husband and not the doctor he also was. The promise made more sense back then, when there was hope and the possibility of life, when he knew he was under no obligation to follow the path his words had made for him.

There is this to know of dying: it comes in moonlight thick as cotton and carves silence into all thoughts. She’d finally been able to form the words fully and lay them before him with a desperation that bordered on anger. This dying, my beloved, is dark and I am tired and you must let me go. Seven days ago, he’d stood in Prince Mekonnen Hospital gripping his ailing wife’s hand and heard from his mouth a promise that was already on its way to being broken. His wife was giving up and was asking him to do the same.

Hailu stared at the long shadows in the living room he once shared with Selam. How many nights, how many of these moons did I watch shrink back into sunlight, then dusk with that woman by my side? It is 1974 and I am afraid without you, he admitted for the first time. Nothing I have ever learned has prepared me for the days ahead if you leave me now.

He stood and walked through the living room into the dining area, resisting the urge to pause at Dawit’s door and reassure himself that his son hadn’t snuck out of the house. He’d told Dawit and Yonas to get ready to visit their mother. He’d seen the sullenness that had settled in Dawit’s face at his strict insistence that the three of them go together.

“We’re a family,” he’d reminded Dawit, the words an echo of the many times he’d had to force Dawit to visit Selam with the rest of the family. His youngest son wanted no one around when he spoke with his mother, protective of their bond.

3.

HIS FATHER WAS
talking but Yonas was trying not to listen. They were waiting for Dawit so they could leave, the wait made longer by Hailu’s voice cutting through the early evening heat.

“It happens to many people.” Hailu was matter-of-fact, his words clipped. “Their heart weakens, it fails to pump enough blood to the brain. Perfusion. The changes are dramatic. But it’s normal. If I can control the blood pressure for long enough, she’ll recover.” He smoothed his tie and adjusted his suit jacket. He’d dressed his best to visit Selam in the hospital. “I don’t understand what’s going wrong.”

A numbing weight pressed on Yonas and settled into an ache. “You’ve gone over this so many times.”

His father continued as if he hadn’t heard, a man trapped in his own language of grief. “Congestive heart failure,” he said. “Nothing more than the weakening of the heart.”

“It’s time to go.” Yonas stood up.

Hailu raised his prayer beads close to his chest. “She can be strong again. The doses of furosemide should have helped.”

Yonas sat back down and let his eyes roam across the living room and settle on his father’s polished prayer beads. His father had started carrying his beads with him everywhere only a week ago. It had once been a point of contention between his parents, with Hailu insisting that religion was a private matter for doctors, not to be put on public display. But you need prayer, too, Selam argued, looking to Yonas as her ally. Hailu had been resolute: no one in his hospital or anywhere else should ever see that he had any doubts whatsoever about his capabilities. There are some, Hailu said, who mistake prayer for weakness.

“We should go before it gets dark.” Yonas stood awkwardly in place. “Those soldiers stop every car at night”—he looked at his watch—“and we don’t want to be late.”

Hailu moved towards Dawit’s room but Yonas held him back.
“Not today,” he said. “We’ll be back again. You’re too tired for another fight.”

Hailu shook his arm free. “If he doesn’t go with us, you know where he’ll go. I treated a boy his age today.”

Yonas wrapped an arm around his shoulders and led him towards the door. “We have to get home before it gets late. Did you see the car that was burning on the street last night? With the university closed, these students have nothing to do but plan more trouble. And besides,” he added, “Sara said she’ll watch him for you.” After his mother, Yonas’s wife Sara was the only one Dawit listened to, if he chose to listen to anyone at all. “You look exhausted,” he said.

A BLUE HAZE
drifted from eucalyptus trees dotting the hillsides of Addis Ababa and clung to the horizon like a faint, tender bruise. It was dusk and a hollow wind whistled through a crack in the driver’s side window of Hailu’s Volkswagen where he sat. Yonas was in front next to him, both of them quiet. Dawit hadn’t responded when he’d knocked on his door, and only Yonas’s pleadings had prevented him from getting his key and forcing his way into his youngest son’s room. He slid his car out of the garage onto the wide dirt road used by motorists and pack animals alike.

Hailu’s neighborhood was a series of newer houses with sprawling gardens and lush lawns, and the more modest old Italian-style homes made of wood and mud with wide verandas and corrugated-tin roofs much like the one he’d inherited from his father. Some owners with large gated compounds rented single-room mud-and-wattle homes to poorer families. The neighborhood had neither the opulent villas nor the decaying shanties of other areas, and it was where Hailu had spent much of his years as a young, newly married doctor. It was a community, and one that, more and more often, he didn’t like to venture far from.

The car dug into potholes on the rocky terrain, straining from the weight of two grown men. Ahead of them and all around, the green hilly landscape, crested with bright yellow
meskel
flowers, rolled against an orange sky. From this point on the road, Addis Ababa’s hills blocked Hailu’s view of the drab concrete-and-glass office buildings that had sprung up in the sprawling city in the last few decades, their ugly façades
dominating
every street, crowding out the kiosks and fruit stands that struggled to maintain the spaces they’d occupied for decades.

He’d grown to dread driving, the stalls, the false starts, the thick noise that pushed through the confines of his car and competed with his thoughts for attention. Everything seemed too loud these days: the exhaust fumes and engines, the brays of stubborn donkeys, the cries of beggars and vendors. The endless throngs of pedestrians. In his car, in the shelter of the regulated heat, he was comforted by the familiar parameters.

Yonas pointed out the window towards the stately high walls of the French Legation that were slowly shrinking in the distance. “I used to cut through the estate to go to school before they put that wall up.” He chuckled. “The
zebenya
almost caught Dawit one day when he tried to follow me. He chased him with his stick. Dawit wanted to come back and find the old guard.” Yonas shook his head, smiling and staring at the wall.

“I’m not used to seeing that stone wall, even after all these years,” Yonas said. There were dark circles under his eyes and he tapped the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, a nervous habit Hailu saw only rarely.