Beneath the Lion's Gaze (4 page)

His father still didn’t understand his need to fight for those too poor and overworked to demand their basic rights. It’s a phase, his father said. You don’t know what you’re doing, you’re only following others.

But he had a reason. There had been a fight. The boy was the son of a neighbor. The rich family lived in a house bigger than Dawit’s, and there were two cars in the garage, one a Mercedes that a chauffeur cleaned and waxed every day. The boy, Fisseha, was older—fifteen to Dawit’s twelve—and at school he carried a thick wooden club and a smirk he worked to perfect into an adult sneer.

Dawit and his best friend Mickey were walking home when he saw a girl sitting at the gate, near the wheel of the polished Mercedes, sobbing. Dawit recognized her as Ililta, the daughter of one of the house girls who worked in the home. She and her mother came to his house sometimes to visit their aging servant Bizu and trade neighborhood gossip. He heard a frantic cry coming from the other side of the opened gate. The sound carried something Dawit would later tell his mother reminded him of a baby, trying to explain what happened next.

“It was small,” he would tell her.

He told the frightened Mickey to wait at the gate. “I’ll just go check,” he said.

“It’s not your house,” Mickey said. “Let’s go.”

Dawit had gone into the compound anyway. There was a shuffle and rustling coming from the open door of the servants’ quarters, and again the desperate, pinched cry. He ran in and it took a few seconds for him to comprehend what he was looking at.

There was a woman, older than his mother, sitting naked on the bed, tears running down her face and trailing between her heavy, sagging breasts. In front of her, holding his penis, was Fisseha, equally naked, the familiar smirk on his face.

“Mulu?” Dawit said. He didn’t recognize her without her clothes on, without the bright smile she usually had whenever she came to visit Bizu.

“Get out of here!” Fisseha said. “Go!” He still had his hand on his penis, his scrawny hips still arched towards Mulu.

And in that second, Dawit would have turned and run, would have grabbed Mickey and gone home and hidden in his room until his heart quieted, but Mulu said: “Please.”

And he saw the panic and shame and terror in her eyes and he knew he couldn’t leave, that he would stay where he was and fight his way out. He attacked Fisseha with a vengeance he reserved for his older, stronger brother. He kicked him, stomped on his toes, kneed his groin, pulled his head up off the ground and bashed it back down, then punched his bloody lips, his bleeding nose, his swelling eyes, and he didn’t stop even after he caught sight of the polished club passing from Mulu’s hand to Fisseha’s weakened grip, then slipping on the floor and rolling under the bed.

“Go home!” Mulu begged. “Go, you’ll get me fired. Go!”

Dawit kept hitting, the naked body beneath him squirming, then slowing, then finally still, bare to his blinding rage. He hit until Mulu’s daughter Ililta ran in and threw a
shamma
over her mother’s nakedness. Mulu’s suddenly blanketed body made Dawit pause, then shrink away from the battered, immobile Fisseha. He was shocked by the damage he’d inflicted. Before he could say or do anything else, Ililta pushed Dawit out of the room, her “thank you” muffled by her crying.

When he got home, his father opened the door, saw the blood on his clothes, and immediately started shouting, asking loud accusatory questions Dawit refused to answer, shaken still by what he’d seen and done. When he tried to explain to his mother later, leaving out the part about Mulu’s nakedness, she’d hugged him, sad.

“This is how many boys learn how to become men,” she said. “House girls are sometimes expected to do more than cook and clean. You could have cost Mulu her job.”

“But she was crying,” Dawit argued.

“She’d be crying without work too. Where would she go with a young daughter? Fisseha’s father pays for Ililta’s education.” His mother kissed his cheeks. “But your temper,” she continued, holding his chin tenderly in her hand. “You hurt him, it was too much. His father took him to the hospital and Abbaye treated him for free.” She shook her head. “No more. Please. For your sake and mine. And thank your father for what he did, stitching up that boy’s face to save you trouble in school. Thank him.”

He never thanked his father, afraid that he would describe in his flat medical voice all the injuries this latest patient had sustained at the hands of his own son. After that day, Mulu never came back to their house, and he and Mickey took an alternate route home. Fisseha slunk away anytime he saw him, though his eyes glowed with hatred. The scene of that fight played over and over again in Dawit’s head, even after all those years.

His father would soon walk into the house and Dawit knew he’d face another fight. Dawit would try to tell him that he hadn’t wanted to go with him and his older brother, but that simple reason wouldn’t be enough for his father. It wouldn’t be enough that he wanted to be alone with his mother, that he wanted to talk to her privately the way they’d always done. His father would never accept that his mother was also his friend.

Dawit wanted to tell his mother things he had a hard time telling anyone else, even Lily. He’d remind her of Fisseha and people like him who took advantage of others and needed to be stopped, and explain why he’d had to break his promise to her and continue to be politically active. He wanted to show her one of the letters from Mickey, sent to him from his trip to one of the famine sites, and prove to her, if not to his father, that his fight was just, that he was doing the right thing. She would understand in a way no one else in his family could. She would remind him that in his veins ran the blood of her father, one of Gondar’s fiercest fighters, and she would tell him that hope can never come from doing nothing.

5.

THIS WASN’T HOW
Mickey remembered wello. The rolling hills of his childhood had been a lush patchwork of greens and browns, rich soil had blanketed the gentle slopes as far as he could see from his aunt’s small hut clustered in a ring of other thatched huts as round and perfect as coins. The farmland, tilled by obedient cattle pushed and prodded by men and boys with strong, thin frames, had once sprouted tall waves of teff, the wheatlike grain growing a pale gold in the sun. The ground had been a deep brown. The sun had been a shimmering yellow. The sky’s blue had been broken by rain clouds and the soft songs of sparrows. He had run through tall grass and hidden in the overgrowth of wide bushes. He’d scattered seeds with his uncle, and raised his face to the first drops of rain that fell as thick as beads. Under the wiry shade of a thin tree, he’d buried a dying bird and sealed the grave with small stones. There had been color in this land that stretched out before him now in deathly paleness. There had been the brays of cattle, the birds and the shrill whistles of herders urging their animals forward. There had been life with all its noises and shades. What was this he was looking at now?

His instructions were to assess the famine the emperor’s officials claimed was under control and easing. The military committee in Addis Ababa had been in a meeting at the Fourth Division headquarters, discussing the latest developments in a city exploding with demonstrations and union strikes. He’d gone into the building, a bag of mail slung over his shoulders to deliver to his superior officer, when he’d walked past the open door of the meeting room.

“You,” the officer at the head of the table had said, his sharp eyes looking him up and down. “Have you ever been to Wello?” His voice seemed louder than it should have been in that small room, in the tense quiet of that table of soldiers and mid-level officers who peered over photographs and documents. “Have you?” he asked, impatient.

“My aunt lives there, in Dessie,” Mickey said, feeling heat crawl up
the
back of his legs and over his head. “She used to,” he said, correcting himself, the officer’s stern face suggesting a man who would show no mercy if given misinformation. “She died last year.”

The rest of the men all mumbled their condolences. A few dropped their heads in respect, then sighed in sympathy before looking at him again. The officer talking to him did not move his direct gaze from his face.

“Cholera,” the officer declared. “It was cholera that these elitists should have prevented, they had the means to stop all of this.” He pounded on the table, his back to Mickey, the full force of his anger rolling out in front of the men who leaned into him and nodded vigorously. “It was cholera, wasn’t it?” He turned again to Mickey.

It was old age, it was a peasant’s bitter existence, it was too many children housed in a body daily wearing out, it was many things, but not cholera. But Mickey said nothing, the man’s confidence and simmering anger forcing him into a reverent silence. Dawit had this confidence, and there was nothing to do in the face of it but stand still and let it sweep over him.

The man pounded the table again. “What’s your name, soldier?” he asked, though he was already gathering his papers and stacking them in a neat pile.

“Mickey,” Mickey said, the bag of mail heavy on his back. His superior officer would surely be angry at his late delivery. “Mikias Habte.”

The officer nodded to the rest of the men around the table. “He’ll go to Wello and bring back a report,” he told them. “Do you know what it means to serve your country?” the officer asked Mickey.

Mickey nodded quickly. “Yes, I do.”

“You can go,” he said, gesturing for Mickey to leave the room. “Report to me when you get back from Wello. Close the door.”

Now, in front of him was a small child with a head bigger than the rest of his body, crouched in a posture of fatigue that only dying old men should know. His bony skull rested on frail wrists, and he stared into the distance blankly, his sagging mouth host to flies and holes where teeth once grew.

Mickey pulled out his notebook and scribbled furiously. Dawit, he wrote, we eat too much in Addis Ababa. We don’t know hunger like
this
. My thick body feels like a scar in this village. I’m embarrassed that I haven’t eaten during the long drive from Addis Ababa, and all I want is to go back to my tent and eat the food my mother packed.

Patches of brown cracked earth had been dug out of the flat dryness of the landscape. They dotted the dead land like pockmarks, craters dug by desperate hands in search of shriveled roots and insects or any stone that could sit in their mouths and remind their tongues of the weight of bread. Mickey’s boots felt tight around his sweaty socks and swollen feet. His rounded belly suddenly an obscenity in this land of rotten animal carcasses and inhuman hunger. The smell of dead cattle forced him to put a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

“You’ll get used to the smell,” the clerk from the local administrator’s office said to him, pointing him in the direction of a small tent. “It’s the carcasses …” He stopped and pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Mickey. “These are some basic facts about the village,” he said, his eyes earnest. “They don’t want to know anything about what’s happening here, those officials. I’ve tried to tell them, but they’re afraid of bad publicity if the news spreads.” He grunted and shook his head. “I’ve been forbidden to tell you the truth, but you can read it.” He pointed to the paper and shoved his hands in the pocket of his white overcoat. “I was told to dress like a doctor in case any reporters come here.”

“What about this boy?” Mickey said, pointing to the child. “Shouldn’t we take him somewhere?”

“His mother left him there to look for food. There’s nothing here.” He spread his hands as if the landscape were an empty table, then gestured again towards a small tent where a tired nurse leaned against the wooden post and watched them with flat eyes. “And with all this, there’s the cholera outbreak.” He walked on without a glance at the child.

“The emperor came here to visit last year. He must have seen this. Isn’t he helping?” Mickey had to quicken his pace to keep up.

“It’s not enough.” The clerk shook his head. “And it’s come too late. When you are convinced that everything that happens is the will of God, what is there to do but wait until God has mercy?” He stopped at the mouth of the tent and turned to Mickey. “People are walking to Addis to beg for food, if they can get there alive. Maybe that’s where
that
child’s mother went.” He stared into the horizon. “Nothing will change if others don’t help. Tell your people for us,” he said. “Tell them what’s happening.”

BACK IN HIS TENT
that cold night, shivering under the pale yellow glow of a weak kerosene lamp, Mickey wrote with urgency and anger, scribbling his words onto the blank paper.

This is how a man tills his land: behind cattle that are tied to one end of a plow that he uses to dig and lift and turn the ground. He holds a stick in one hand and the end of the plow in the other. At the end of that stick is a rope that he uses to whip the animals when they tire from the hot sun and the lack of water and simple hunger. A man works like this every day, every month, year after year, behind his cattle, his hand attached to a plow that has dug its own imprints into his calloused palms. He speaks to no one but himself, he hears nothing but his own slavish grunts as he pushes his plow into dirt, willing a crop to grow from unforgiving ground, praying daily for more rain. But it didn’t rain in 1972 in the north, my friend, and the farmer had no crops. The rains did not come as they should, and when the rains failed, the crops failed, and when the crops failed, the farmer grew hungry, and when he grew hungry, his cattle also grew hungry, because a farmer will feed his cattle before himself. When the cattle began to die, the farmer gathered his family and tried to walk to the nearest village, the nearest aid shelter, the nearest anywhere where he could hold out his proud hand and beg for food. But everyplace he went was the same as what he had left. They are starving here in Wello, Dawit. They are starving in Tigre and Shoa. We have lived in the city and we have forgotten about these people. And imagine, now, a farmer far from Wello, in the south, where the rains are more forgiving and the land has not been cursed by famine. This farmer plows land that isn’t his, that was never his father’s, which was never his grandfather’s, and will never be his son’s. He works as hard as his animals day after day to pay a landowner’s taxes and to glean enough crops so his family has enough grains for food after they’ve given the landowner his share. The landowner’s share is always large. It is always more than the landowner needs. It is a selfish share created by a selfish system that preys on the weak and makes them servants to the
rich
. Dawit, we live in a feudal system. Our country exploits those who work the hardest to stay alive. Our emperor has built the myth of this land on the blood of those who have been too tired to voice their own truths. Is this my country? We have grown up together, Dawit, but I was someone else before you knew me. My father was this farmer from the south, he died on a rich man’s plot of land tied to the wrong end of his plow because he’d been forced to sell his cattle to feed his family that harvest. My father died like an animal, still tied to those ropes when I found him, swallowing with his last breaths the dust of another man’s land, broken by the burden of his labor. The rich think this land is theirs though they have never earned the right to call it theirs. Not like these farmers. Not like my father. Most of those who are here, on the ground dying, are the ones who were strong enough to walk out of their villages and get here. The roads are littered with our people who died on the way, their bodies rotting in the sun if the vultures haven’t gotten to them first. We dishonor our dead and our workers, Dawit. The rich have kept this secret, the emperor has stolen this truth from us and we have to fight to get our country back and save these people. A man told me today as many as two hundred thousand will die. They will die. It is too late for them. Do we even have as many alive in Addis Ababa?