Beneath the Lion's Gaze (33 page)

The Colonel rested his hand on the electrical switch again. Then he continued talking, his whole body shaking. “Are you telling me they disobeyed my orders and took her to that butcher? Are you expecting me to believe you were merciful in killing her? Is that it?” The Colonel stood over him, his eyes wet, his head moving from side to side. “What have I done?” he whispered again and again.

DAWIT AND SOLOMON
sat in a hut in Sululta. Dawit shivered, his thin shirt no defense from the nighttime chill. He’d assumed this would be a short meeting, and now Solomon was telling him something different.

“I need to get in touch with my family,” Dawit said. “They’ll worry,” he added when the man didn’t respond.

“We can’t take that chance. The military’s crawling all over Addis looking for Mekonnen the killer of soldiers.” Solomon had a rifle on his shoulder, a cigarette smoldering at the corner of his mouth, both objects seemed permanently attached to him. “Right now, they don’t know you’re Mekonnen. You’ll stay in hiding until it’s safe. If they catch you, they’ll find ways to make you talk, believe me. This is the only way to keep us all out of danger.” Solomon lit a partial cigarette and took three deep draws before throwing it on the ground. “Practice loading faster,” he said, extending his weapon to Dawit.

—

“HE DIDN’T COME
home last night,” Yonas said to Sara. They were in the prayer room, trying to hide from Tizita, who’d clutched at Sara’s skirt all day asking for Dawit. “I called his friends, no one’s seen him since yesterday.” He drew the curtain on the window. “It’s not like him.”

“Lily doesn’t know anything.” The echo of gunfire rustled past the window. “She was here. She’d told him she was leaving this week and he was supposed to see her today.”

Yonas paced. The floorboard creaked under his steps.

“She’ll hear you,” Sara warned, pointing to the door. He stopped.

Yonas looked long into Sara’s face. He smoothed the red velvet cloth draped over the table. “Do you know something?”

“Like what?” Sara tried to smile but her lips only trembled, then slipped back into a grim line.

He kept quiet, intent on her expressions, on the secrets they both knew she kept.

“Don’t do that,” she said. She waited for him to respond. “Say something,” she said.

He gave a jolt. “His suitcase. Where’s his suitcase?” He pushed Sara aside and ran down the stairs. “Did they take him away when we were gone somewhere?”

Sara found Yonas in Dawit’s closet rummaging through the piles of clothes and shoes. He yanked a suitcase from the bottom of a heap. “It’s here.” He clung to it, turning away from her. “It’s here.”

54.

THE MORTICIAN OPENED
a thick metal door. “We keep them in here until their families come,” he said to Yonas, wiggling a toothpick in the large gap between his teeth. “It takes a while for some, they don’t want to admit the truth.” He let the door shut behind him. “Tell me what he looks like, I’ll go in and check.”

“He looks like me.”

The mortician shook his head. “You all say the same thing. Do you have a picture?”

Yonas fumbled inside his shirt pocket. “I didn’t think—”

“Any birthmarks, scars, age?”

“He’s twenty-seven, tall like me, he wears a green shirt a lot, it’s his favorite.” His younger brother’s image came to him in fragments: the wide openness of his grin, the laugh lines around his eyes, the strong lines of his jaw, the frailty of the ankle he’d broken as a small boy.

The mortician tapped on the door. “We’re full in here, I need more details. Some of the families don’t have a hundred and twenty-five
birr
so we’re waiting for them. Not enough cold storage in this entire city.”

“A hundred and twenty-five birr?”

The mortician sighed wearily. “The bullet fee. If a bullet was used to kill your brother, I have to charge you for it before you can get the body. Policy. I thought everybody knew.”

Yonas was too stunned to say anything.

The mortician seemed to take pity on him. “Listen,” he said. “I’ll try to see if I can find him, but I don’t have much time.” He went into the room.

It had been nearly a week and Dawit hadn’t come home. Sara, finally panicked after what seemed too long to him, had walked from house to house in their neighborhood asking for his whereabouts. Yonas had gone to his father’s jail and worked his way down the long line of people asking about his brother. Many knew him, but none had seen him in a week.

“They might have got him, he was one of the loud ones here,” said
a
tired-looking man with deep wrinkles around his mouth. “He was a good boy.” Then the old man had sank onto the top step of the jail. “They know which ones to get.”

The mortician came out of the room. “Nothing. Did you check the roads around your house?”

“I’ve checked everywhere.”

“You have to do it every day. If you can’t, I know someone. He’s very good, cheap,” the mortician said.

“Cheap?”

At this, the thin man laughed. “He’s smart. He should charge extra for going into the hills and checking in the river, but who can afford that?” The mortician took him by the elbow. “Come back with a picture, I’ll have my friend look.”

“Let me go in.” Yonas fished in his pockets and pulled out money.

“Go home.”

Yonas pressed the money into his moist palm and squeezed it closed.

“Have it your way,” the mortician said, slipping the money into his pocket. He swung the door open and turned his head away from the smell. “Excuse the mess.”

The mortician handed Yonas a small box of toothpicks from his jacket. “They help keep the smell out, at least I like to think so.” He smiled, then let the grin slip off his face. “If he’s in there, I can’t let you have the body until you pay. They shoot them after they’re dead if they killed them some other way, just to collect the fee.”

THEY WERE LINED UP
in rows in various stages of decay and undress. They lay on dulled metal gurneys shoved into each other. From somewhere, the jagged breathing of a hungry hyena drifted by. He fumbled in his pocket for his father’s prayer beads.

Jaws slack from agony and shock, hands tangled in a web of broken fingers, and the same heartbreaking gaze of a trapped animal on every face. There wasn’t enough air in the room. Yonas realized his breathing came in quick, short takes; he began to get dizzy, began to feel the weight of breathlessness, and a pocket of something warm and black and overpowering rose from the center of his chest and worked its way up. He knew when it reached his head he’d faint. Dawit wasn’t in this room, couldn’t be.

55.

SELAM BLUE AND
brilliant sits in the cold gray of his concrete cell, her crosses bright as new leaves after a rain. She opens her arms and Hailu feels his heart slipping out of his body. She is as young as when they married, when it was just the two of them discovering each other. He sits up, feels trapped by this aged body, by this strange lack of sound, listens for the tiniest echo of his breathing, brings a hand to his mouth, feels his breath against his palm, can’t hear himself. Ice climbs up his spine, twists its way into his stomach, rests in his bones, sinks to the marrow. Selam is fading. A weight tugs at his head, closes his throat, paralyzes him. His jaw aches, he breathes through his nose, inhales mucus, feels like he is drowning even as he tells himself that it is impossible.

BOOK FOUR

56.

“REVOLUTIONARY MOTHERLAND OR
death!”

Clouds of dust swarmed around a group of prisoners marching past numb-faced onlookers. They moved with military precision, stiff legs rising and falling in rhythm. Bored soldiers stood at each street corner with rifles tilted casually towards the prisoners.

“Long Live Marxism!” the marchers cried.

“Louder, anarchists! Stand straight!” a long-necked soldier shouted to an old man leaning on a young girl. He ignored the flies that crept near his eye.

The young girl raised her hand to her mouth to shout louder. She pushed the old man off her shoulder and adjusted the tattered collar of her red shirt. A deep gash exposed the pink of open flesh on her collarbone.

“Viva Proletariat Ethiopia! Viva Guddu!” she cried with the rest.

“Raise the signs higher! Don’t slow down!” the soldier yelled at a row of boys holding handmade signs against their bony hips.

Berhane limped off to the side. “Viva Guddu!” he cried. He dropped his sign and pulled his sagging shorts over his waist, revealing angry, infected wounds on each leg. “I don’t have a belt,” he whimpered to the boys marching on without him. “Wait for me.”

“I said don’t slow down!” The soldier raised his rifle. He edged his finger towards the trigger and leaned his face closer to the rifle’s steel frame. “Didn’t you hear me?”

Berhane scrambled to pick up his sign. “I’m hurrying!”

He looked up just in time to see the hollow-eyed stare of the gun and hear his own sharp breath. The soldier pulled the trigger. The loud pop of exploding gunfire silenced the marchers. A puff of smoke bloomed over the fallen body.

“Keep marching!” the soldier yelled, veins drawn on his neck. “Or you’re next!”

The marchers fell into a silent pantomime, their stricken glances at Berhane hastened by the menacing aim of the soldier’s rifle. They shoved crooked-lettered placards higher, then put one foot in front of the other. Left right left right. They walked in perfect unison.

“I can’t hear you!” the soldier shouted.

“Victory for the Masses!”

“Revolution Is Joy!”

“Death to Imperialism!”

In the sun, the crooked letters, red and sloppy, shone against the dirty brown paper.

YONAS HEARD THE
gunshot and turned. There was a small boy lying facedown on the road. He shook his head and tried to get through the crowd without another glance. People around him squeezed together, an immovable mass of prayers, and stared at the fallen body. Yonas tried to push through but he was blocked by chests and arms, legs and hips, trapped by the pressure of too many living bodies. He gave up and looked at his watch. It was just past noon. He’d waited two hours to get fresh meat and onions.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the unflinching momentum of bare feet trampling the small figure in a steady march forward.

“Revolutionary Ethiopia!” the marchers cried.

The crowd began to thin as the last row of marchers filed past. A group of women hurried by with tears running down their faces, their hands stifling screams.

“You!” the soldier shouted.

A stooped woman dressed in black looked at Yonas, shook her head in pity, then grabbed her friend and walked faster.

“Stop! I’m talking to you, with the bag,” the soldier said.

A few people slowed. Their glance followed the soldier’s gaze to land on Yonas. Others quickened their steps. Some stopped completely, a weary sadness etched on their faces.

Yonas stood still, his eyes on his bag. He pulled his shoulders down, hunched into himself, and prayed. He avoided the soldier’s glare.

“Help me get this rubbish out of the way.” The soldier was a skinny
man
. The whites of his eyes were the color of rust. The barrel of his rifle pointed at the small boy on the road. “He shit himself.”

Yonas looked at the dark stain that flowered from the back of the boy’s shorts and crept down his thin leg.

He was small. He looked the same age as Tizita.

“Did you hear me?” the soldier asked, standing in front of Yonas. He turned to wink at his comrades who were gathering around the two men. People dropped their heads and shuffled uncomfortably in place as the soldiers brushed past them.

“I thought we killed all the deaf last week,” one of the other soldiers joked.

“This one didn’t hear the announcement,” another quipped.

“What are you going to do, Lukas?” another said. “Call Mekonnen to get this body?” The soldiers laughed.

The sun bore heavily on Yonas, patches of sweat fanned the back of his light blue shirt. He didn’t move. He only stared at the boy in the road and tightened his grip on his plastic bag. His fingernails cut into his palms.

“I said get over there and move it out of the way!” Lukas shouted. “You should be down the road helping with the marchers, not here,” he said to the other soldiers.

The soldiers smirked. Lukas pushed close to Yonas. His sharp nose grazed his chin. He stretched his neck. “Move this body out of the road if you don’t want to die.”

“Professor Yonas?” A soldier with soft eyes and a high forehead sprang from the line of men. “Is it you?”

Yonas calculated how late he already was in getting home. Sara was waiting for the meat. He’d promised Tizita that he’d help her with her homework. She was learning the Amharic alphabet. He was going to show her how to write her name. He was going to sit and talk to her as he hadn’t done in a very long time. She was seven. The dead boy, could he have been any older?

The soldier shook his arm lightly. “Professor, drag the body out of the road. It’s already dead, there’s nothing else you can do.”

There was the twirl of a safety latch, released.

“Lukas! Just wait, he’s going to move it. Professor, please,” the soldier said.

Yonas’s limbs felt thick, slowed by a pressure he could feel in his chest. He put down his plastic bag and walked towards the boy. He grasped the skinny ankles and pulled. Sticky flesh gave way under his palms and he saw garish rope burns on the boy’s legs. He leaned down to turn the body onto its back, to lift it by its armpits and avoid exposed wounds. He flipped the body over.

“Hurry up!” Lukas said.

Yonas drew back, startled. Berhane. “I know him,” he said softly. “I know this boy.”

“You’ve got one minute!” Lukas barked.

“Take it to the side,” the other soldier pleaded.

Berhane’s face was swollen and cruelly bruised, nearly unrecognizable if not for his large front teeth and equally large eyes. Yonas could see, even in this vacant stare, the last traces of the little boy’s wide-eyed curiosity. He turned his head and dragged the child out of the road. Then he knelt next to Berhane and shut his vacant eyes, once again seeing his resemblance to Sofia. He folded the boy’s arms across his chest.