Beneath the Lion's Gaze (24 page)

“It’s not right to leave a body.”

“You want to save people, then save the living.” Solomon stood up, pushed his chair into the table. “Those who are dead aren’t worth dying for.” He strode out, his tea untouched.

HAILU LAY IN BED
fully clothed, a suitcase at his feet. He was dressed in layers: two pairs of socks, three shirts, two pairs of briefs, and one jacket on top of a thick sweater. He could feel the sweat collecting under his arms. He hadn’t slept all night. He’d spent his time looking through photographs, walking barefoot, felt the smoothness of wood under his feet. He’d traced his path with fingertips pressed on sky blue walls. Selam’s favorite color.

They used to paint the room together once a year, and as their sons grew older, it had become a family project. There were no more new coats after she died. He had come to hate the color. He’d hoped that sunlight would have dulled the brightness to a shade closer to a solemn dusk, but it hadn’t happened yet.

He sat up and imagined floating in an expanse of sky. He held his breath as long as he could, wanted to feel light, even light-headed, when he woke Yonas.

HAILU AND YONAS
knelt in front of the statue of Saint Mary. “You have to drive me there,” Hailu said.

Yonas turned to his father, then back to the statue. “How could this happen? I don’t understand.”

“Let’s go,” Hailu said. “I have to hurry.” He stood up.

“Why? Why do they want you? We’ve stayed out of things.”

“Get up.” Hailu was rigid.

“Let’s hide you,” Yonas said, still kneeling. “I’ll wake Dawit and we’ll hide you.” He wrapped his arms around his father’s legs.

“I don’t want to be here when Tizita wakes up. You’ll explain for me.” Hailu pulled Yonas up.

“I’ll go instead,” Yonas said. “I can go talk to them. I’ll take Dawit and we’ll go together.”

“I’ll be back by this afternoon.” Hailu cleared his throat. “They’ve told me that, there’s no reason to believe anything else.”

“You can hide with Melaku until I get you. Hurry.” He pushed Hailu out of the prayer room, nearly stumbling in his haste. “We’ll go to Melaku’s, then we’ll take you somewhere else.”

“Stop it,” Hailu said, his voice shaking. “They’ll come here for you and Dawit, maybe even Sara, if I don’t go.”

Yonas reached out to embrace his father, but Hailu made no move towards him. He let his arms drop. He was not the son his father needed. He understood, finally, what his mother had always known about Dawit, that this son of hers was the strongest of her children. Dawit would have fought with Hailu, instead of wanting to hug him like a child. Dawit would have burst into the jail and demanded they leave his father alone.

Yonas gripped his father’s hand. “I won’t let you go.”

“They’ll arrest you if I don’t go. There’s no other choice.” Hailu hugged Yonas and held on with fierceness. “I know you. Remember there was no other way.” He let go just as quickly and turned around, composed and collected.

They walked into Hailu’s dark bedroom. Yonas turned on the light, illuminating the anguish in Hailu’s face. It sent him back to the days of his mother’s illness.

“Abbaye, when Emaye was sick—”

“There’s nothing to say,” Hailu said, his mouth trembling. “Turn off the light. Hand me my suitcase. I want to take my car.”

Yonas switched the light off and felt for the suitcase. “But why did you pack if—” He found Hailu’s firm hold already on the handle. “Give it to me,” Yonas said.

Hailu didn’t let go. They left, both clutching the suitcase, Hailu leading Yonas with steps that had long ago memorized the way out.

40.

DAWIT CRAWLED AGAINST
the wind, feeling for a hand, a foot, the edge of a torso. The handkerchief around his mouth drowned the stink of corpse in the scent of his father’s cologne. He brushed against stone and dirt, fallen branches and dung. He worked his way to the center of the square, where the body still lay. He cut ropes loose with a knife.

Dawit wrapped a large blanket around and under the body, then hurriedly dragged it out of the square to Yonas’s car. It was his luck that there was no one to witness this. Soldiers in the area broke orders to see one of the only bands still allowed by the Derg to perform. He braced himself to face Mulu’s wrath and confusion and asked his own mother for help in convincing Mulu to bury her daughter without ceremony.

THE JAIL WAS
a concrete building rising out of a dusty meadow shorn of trees. The parking lot was a patch of dirt carved out of the dry landscape. Hailu’s small Volkswagen was dwarfed by the military jeeps and trucks lined along one side like slumbering crocodiles. Though the building had windows, no light shone through. What a familiar sight they must have been for the soldiers who worked inside: two men in a small car in the parking lot, sitting in silence with stricken faces.

Yonas felt his father’s distance and didn’t know what to say.

“Hailu,” Yonas said; his father’s name meant “his power.” He felt his father shaking beside him. “Hailu,” he said, softer.

Hailu clung to the hand of a son who could not stop repeating his name. He pulled himself back from the space beyond clouds and let sorrow and fear wash over him.

41.

THE DINING ROOM
table floated wide and long between them and made Dawit feel like a small boy again. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What are you saying?”

“I already told you,” Yonas said. “I have to tell Sara,” he added, looking into the empty living room as if expecting Hailu to emerge, “but I wanted to talk to you first.” He wiped his face and reached for Dawit’s hand.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Dawit said, drawing back his hand. “How could he be summoned like that? For what?”

“Don’t you know someone who can help?” Yonas put his head in his hands, pushed his palms into his eyes. “Don’t you know someone?”

“How could you just let him go?” Dawit stood up and spoke to the top of his brother’s head. The news began to settle in. His father was in jail. “Why did you just drive him there?” He could make out the shape of his father’s radio, square and small, in the living room.

Yonas hunched over his hands. “I tried to stop him.”

“And you could have woken me.” Dawit went into the living room and felt the vastness of the room devour him. He could still smell the thick odors of musk and body, dirt and sweat, still hear Mulu’s guttural wails at the sight of her daughter. He wiped his nose, took in his father’s chair, the silent radio, the emptiness of it all. “I should have been with you. I could have done something.”

“There was nothing you could do. I tried everything,” Yonas whispered. “I had to take him. They would have come for us.”

“I’m going to the jail,” Dawit said.

“I tried everything,” Yonas repeated, his eyes unfocused. “He wouldn’t let me do anything.” He thought for a moment. “There’s Mickey.”

Dawit remembered Mickey that day they had passed a sobbing Ililta and heard Mulu’s small cry, thought of how this fat, cowardly boy had
wanted
to do nothing but walk away, how he’d stood by and watched, then run away when Dawit fought Fisseha.

“No,” he said.

Yonas stood and pushed his chair in. “I’m not asking you.”

The living room was still filled with the smell of their father, his sharp, clean scents, the lingering odors of a man fastidious in his habits, dignified in all his manners.

“Did he ask for me?” Dawit suddenly asked.

DAWIT UNFOLDED HIMSELF
slowly out of his father’s car and gazed at the massive hulk of the jail, a gray slab of imposing thickness built with Soviet money. It was planted on flat land that seemed to crack from the unaccustomed weight. There were people crowded around the entrance, men and women and girls and boys, swarming and colliding with each other, only a few bothering to form any semblance of a line at the door. He felt his stomach twist.

A short man wearing a tailored business suit beat on the thick door. “Open the door! Open up, we’re not leaving.”

Dawit walked over to him. “My father’s in there. Did you see a tall man with white hair come in last night?”

The man gave him an impatient look and returned to pounding on the door. He looked back at Dawit. “The window,” he said to him, pointing above his head. “Can you reach it? See if there’s anyone in there.”

What Dawit saw through the small, high window made him break into a fresh sweat. The office was a display of military precision. There were no stacks of papers lining dirty, cluttered desks. No groups of soldiers sat in clusters smoking cigarettes and playing cards. No cigarette butts lined the floors. It had the bland orderliness of a vacant hotel with its glossy floors and shiny countertops. Dawit turned back to the businessman.

“It’s empty,” he told him.

“They see us,” a man dressed in a security guard uniform said, coming to stand near them. He inhaled on a bent cigarette. “It’s the same every morning. They make us stand here for hours, then they let a few of us in.”

“My father’s in there,” Dawit said. “He was summoned.”

“You’re lucky. They took my daughter from class,” the security guard said. “I work in the same building, they used the back way, no chance to see her.”

Dawit turned away. “Where do they keep them?” he asked, taking in the milling crowd. “All these people are looking for someone?”

The security guard took a long drag of his cigarette and let the smoke billow out of his nose and mouth. He shook his head. “It’s small.”

The talking faded and then a hush fell over the crowd. In the parking lot, a young woman in a floral dress lifted a suitcase out of her car. She had a suit jacket draped over her arm. She tottered on high heels.

“They told me to turn myself in. How do I get in?” she said.

A sympathetic murmur lifted from the crowd. They cleared her path to the door.

The young woman went to the door and began to knock.

“Why are you here?” the security guard asked. “Don’t you know what they do?”

“My husband’s inside,” the young woman said. “They told me if I didn’t come, they’d kill him.” She bit her lip. “I don’t know what he did.”

Dawit stood next to her. She was the same height as Lily, but more slender. She had fragile wrists with sharp bones that looked like they might snap with too much pressure. “Stand here,” he said, pointing to the other side of him. “If the door opens, it’ll hit you.”

“How do I tell them I’m here?” She rapped against the heavy door.

“They hear you,” the security guard said.

The young woman sat on her suitcase, her jacket still folded neatly over her arm. “He gave this to me,” she said, caressing the material.

“Did they tell you why your husband’s in jail?” Dawit asked. “Did they give any reason?”

“Get out of here,” the security guard said to her, lighting another cigarette. “Make them find you.”

She ignored them both. Dawit fought the urge to hold her arms and force her to pay attention to him. He wished he’d brought a picture of his father.

“Is your husband a doctor?” Dawit asked. He didn’t know what answer he wanted, and he flinched as the question came out of his mouth.

“A cook,” she said. “We have three children.” She ran her eyes over Dawit’s fashionable jeans and shirt. “We’re not rich.”

Together, they watched the sun burn pale, then yellow, then gold in a darkening horizon. Then the front door swung open just long enough for three soldiers to grab the young woman and drag her inside.

THIS IS FEAR.
I know this taste of bile and sweat in my mouth. I have run against Italian bullets with this taste thickened on my tongue, I have raised a rifle and a scalpel and my hands with its familiar sting and stink, I am no stranger to this. This is fear, Hailu said again, but it didn’t ease the tightness in his throat. It didn’t loosen the veins that swelled and throbbed from the pressure of a heart beating much too fast. There is nothing here that is not the sum of its most minute parts, there is nothing here that logic and rational discourse cannot put back into place. But each breath seemed to shove him deeper into the jail despite the fact that he hadn’t moved from this solid chair in what felt like hours, maybe days.

So Hailu started counting.
And, hulet, sost, arat
. He couldn’t understand why the Colonel would be so interested in a small, quiet girl who was fragile, so fragile, much too fragile to live in these times. He would tell the Colonel that she was brought to him already near dead. How do you expect me to keep a dying body alive, he’d ask. I’m nothing but a simple doctor, a mere man. Like you, he’d remind the Colonel. We two are only men. It is God we need to question, to interrogate, to beg for answers.

Hailu lifted his face to taste a fresh breeze. The cane is tall in my fields, so tall it blocks my vision, closes off the sun, and curtains me in darkness. He didn’t listen to the heavy door that shut behind him. He dug himself even deeper into the steadily increasing numbers instead. He searched his pockets for prayer beads he realized he’d forgotten at home. He took Tizita’s hand. Count with me, Tizzie.

“Quit praying,” a soldier ordered. He shoved him out of the small room into a long hallway, then into a wide reception area with fluorescent lights so bright not even sunlight could compete. The air was weightless and chilly, it burned his nose to inhale.

The jail was cleaner than his hospital lobby. It held no smells; there
were
no noises. Soldiers were attached to chairs, hunched over documents that sat atop perfectly arranged desks, rigid as statues. Not one looked up to take in this latest prisoner, flanked by two of their stern-faced comrades. Hailu faltered for a moment, but a hand pushed him forward, and he heard inside the noiselessness that was making his head ache, tiny telltale signs of life: the scratch of pen on paper, the deliberate thump of a stamp, the opening of a freshly oiled drawer, the slow hush of a chair pushing across a concrete floor.

“Sit,” a voice ordered behind him.

Hailu slumped into the metal chair pushed under him. The slant of light that pushed into the room from a strip of space in the curtains was crisp, nearly bleached of all golden color. It settled on a soldier carefully thumbing through a stack of papers with a back as straight as a ruler. Hailu looked around him. Gone was his sugar cane field. Tizita’s hand had evaporated. The air bore down in all its coldness. He hugged his suitcase to his chest, begged his body to produce heat to replace the chill he already felt settling into his bones. The urge to run overtook him again, but the very order of things, the symmetry of motion and stillness in the dark gray office, made even the thought of resistance illogical.