Beneath the Lion's Gaze (8 page)

Sara rushed to her side. “Bizuye, Bizu, let’s go into the kitchen.” She
took
the tiny woman in her arms and tried to lead her out of the room. Bizu resisted, her sobs growing louder.

“I can’t leave,” Bizu said. “Did you see them? I can’t leave.” She stayed by the doorway, Sara helplessly rubbing her back.

“He couldn’t have known how bad it was,” Yonas said. “There’s no way.”

“How could he ignore this?” Dawit asked. He was standing again, pointing towards the television, his eyes on his brother. “All those ministers he made rich should be charged with a crime! That’s what a new government will fix. These rich elites are nothing but traitors to their people, and until we get rid of all of them, nothing will change!” He spoke with such force that a vein throbbed in his forehead.

Hailu’s eyes were fixed on the screen and the rolling credits. “It’s true,” he whispered.

“What’s true?” Dawit sat down again with some effort.

Hailu turned, snapping out of his reverie. “Does it matter?” he said. “All your protesting and marching will do nothing for these people. You want to call the ministers traitors, you want another new prime minister, a new constitution? What happens in the meantime? The problem is too big. We need help immediately, not a new government and more disruption.” He wound his prayer beads around his wrist.

Outside their window came a rising tide of voices. A young man shouted in the distance, followed by an answering yell, then a responding howl. Women called to each other in high-pitched tones. Families had already stepped into the courtyard of Hailu’s compound, their murmurs growing louder to rise above the noises beyond the gate. Heavy footsteps pounded down the road. A sharp rock crashed against the gate. Cars sped by, loud music blaring. No one would be locked in their homes that night. It seemed the entire city was slowly opening their doors and windows, their surprise and stunned anger too volatile to be contained within four walls.

12.

THERE WERE FIVE
of them and they smelled of fresh sweat and gunpowder. They came to him in the dead hours of the morning, speaking in whispered tones. He was waiting, his back to the door, a Bible under his pillow, prayers for the hungry spilling from his lips. He didn’t move when the doorknob twisted, pliant and well oiled. He pretended not to hear the first shuffle of hesitant feet into his bedroom.

“Emperor Haile Selassie,” one of them said, his tone as solemn as a prayer, “please get up.”

The emperor forced his legs straight and smoothed his military uniform, the rows of shining medals swaying against his chest. He held out his hand for his coat and waited calmly. The day had finally come.

The man who spoke coughed softly. “Get your coat and come with us, please. Your Majesty.”

The emperor squared his shoulders and raised his eyes to look into the shadowed faces of the five. His advisors. Fully molded bodies in army fatigues, with sharp eyes and teeth, strong hands and firm feet. They could not meet his gaze, and he realized he could not remember their names. Only the man furthest to the left, shorter and darker than the rest, dared to glance in his direction once. An unfamiliar face, the emperor thought, but the look of him, that haughty defiance of a caged animal, he’d seen in some of his fiercest generals, and it was then that the emperor understood.

“Our era is over,” he said. “Yes.” He stared into the dark, his back rigid. He let his eyes linger on each of the officers until they shifted uncomfortably and one of them sneezed. He noticed that all of them kept their heads bowed, maintained a respectful distance from him, his subjects once more. “There’s no use fighting the Almighty. Let us go,” he said, and led them out of his room and into the wide marble hallway, their footsteps echoing like a volley of gunfire.

A perfect triangle of light crawled from under his library door and
the
emperor stepped into its path and out of the shadows as he entered his last day as the King of Kings. In his library, two groups of noblemen and soldiers, pressed into their chairs like windblown birds, rose and bowed deeply as he sat down at his desk.

A trembling police officer dressed in shabby trousers stumbled in his haste to stand at attention. Sweat dripped freely from his temple into the neck of his ill-fitting shirt. The tallest of the five men shoved a document in his chest and instructed him to read. The officer took the paper, gripping it so hard it doubled into sloppy folds in his shaking hands. Another soldier held the policeman’s wrists to keep them still so the frightened man could read.

“Recognizing that the present system is undemocratic; that Parliament has been serving not the people but its members and the ruling and aristocratic classes; and that its existence is contrary to the motto ‘Ethiopia
Tikdem
,’ Ethiopia First; Haile Selassie I is hereby deposed as of today, September 12, 1974.”

The emperor felt the heat of a thousand eyes fall on him, and he looked from one minister to another, from one nobleman and relative to the next, and he folded his hands in front of him, index fingers and thumbs touching, an unbroken trinity. He remained seated, refusing to believe the end would be so undignified and without ceremony, announced by a man who carried traces of dirt under his fingernails. He said, “We have raised you up. Have you forgotten?”

From the back of the room seeped the sound of tears breaking into uneven sobs.

One of the noblemen walked to him and tenderly kissed his cheek. “Go,” he whispered. “Don’t make this more difficult.” He led him to the door, that simple gesture releasing chair scrapes and whispers, sending the noises crashing against the emperor, who found himself spiraling in the deafening cacophony.

Dazed, the emperor trailed the five men outside and waited for his Mercedes. One of them motioned him to the back of a blue Volkswagen, and Emperor Haile Selassie needed no words to convey his contempt for the order, for the officers, for the treasonous plot. The shortest of the men, his movements spare and tightly coiled, pointed towards the car and swung the back door wider, his skittish eyes the only evidence of his impatience. Under a rising sun furiously beating its way through
clouds
, the five stood, neatly ordered and stiff, sweating, waiting, then waiting some more until the old man finally slumped, defeated, and squeezed into the back of the small car.

Despite the onlookers who cheered as the Volkswagen drove past, despite the ringing in his head and the chorus of shouts that greeted him through the thick glass, despite the deep thud of drumbeats from hands as fast as wings, nothing could have convinced the emperor that heaven had not fallen into a sudden hush at this betrayal of his kingdom, and he knew that it would be in this absence of sound that God would hear the prayers of his Chosen One and heed his call.

Overhead, the first crack of thunder rolled through the Ethiopian sky and then the rain. The emperor watched his beloved city blur and grow dim, and then everywhere, the quiet.

13.

“WE’LL HAVE A
hard time getting home,” Hailu said to Sara as he opened the windows in Selam’s hospital room for fresh air. The thick smell of smoke and petrol drifted in. “Tanks are blocking most of the roads.” He stared outside for a moment, at the unusually congested roads and the gray haze that stretched across the hills like a stubborn stain. “Did they really arrest the emperor?”

“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” Sara felt Selam’s temperature. “She’s sleeping more,” she said, frowning. “Yesterday, she told me she’s been having strange dreams.”

“It’s the medicines,” Hailu said. “She’s stable.” Below them, he watched two young boys ambling down Churchill Road towards the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia with a large bundle of branches strapped to their backs. They paused to stare at one of the tanks resting at a corner, then continued on, their high-pitched chatter rolling into the room during a brief lapse in street noise.

“That documentary was horrible, but why arrest Princess Tenag-nework and the other princesses? What do they have to do with it?” Sara angled Selam’s face away from the glare of sunlight. “We should leave. Sofia started today,” she said. “Bizu’s not happy, but she’s too old to do all the housework herself.”

Hailu sifted through pill bottles. Selam had lost weight, her skin was pale, her face was slack and dull. She looked much older than him. “Almaz keeps telling me to take her home,” he said, shaking pills into his hand and counting them.

“She’s right,” Sara said, watching Hailu separate pills by color and size in his palm. She held out her hand. “Let me have them. You should call home and check on everyone.”

“I called. Dawit’s out.” He shook his head in disgust and let his gaze follow Churchill Road’s long path from Piazza to the railway station.

Just a few months ago, protestors had marched on this road with
their
cries for reform. They’d worked their way from City Hall past the post office, turned towards the hills of Entoto at Meskel Square, passed Jubilee Palace, Parliament, and Arat Kilo, and made their way from De Gaulle Square to St. Giorgis Cathedral, completing a nearly perfect circle. The city had felt under siege by that steady onslaught of marching feet. Their shouts had been like rolling thunder breaking again and again, so deep and loud that residents had locked their doors and stepped away from windows. It had all been full of fury and noise back then, but he’d been sure that diplomacy and respect for the monarchy would triumph. Today, however, the emperor, his only surviving daughter, his grandson Commodore Iskinder Desta, his granddaughters, and hundreds of his ministers and officials were under arrest.

Hailu shook his head and turned away from the window. “Did Bizu have you write down rules for Sofia to follow?” he asked. Bizu had never learned to read or write.

Sara smiled. “She drew a line on the floor in the kitchen that Sofia can’t cross. She can’t get to all the spices.”

“She used to make my life miserable when I was a boy with her rules.” He tried to return Sara’s smile and failed. He watched her gentleness with Selam as she held a cup to his wife’s mouth and tilted her head to help her swallow the pills. She wiped the corner of Selam’s mouth with her finger when she finished. The simple gesture made Hailu look away. His wife was completely helpless.

“Emaye’s lost more weight,” Sara said.

“She’s stable,” Hailu repeated, then held the door open for Sara. “Let’s get home,” he said as they left the room. He looked back at the closing door. “I’ve almost forgotten what she was like before.”

SELAM DIPS INTO THE
crevice of a rolling cloud, sourness coating her tongue. A dry whirlpool threads dust through its hollow middle and a thousand startled crows flood the sky. A sad owl coos and moans, its wings beating against powerful gusts. A feather falls in wide circles to the earth. Selam tucks herself behind a veil of clouds and sinks into the gray. She flies over Legehar train station and sees a dingy square building with peeling paint and a long line of men shuffling in front of soldiers seated at metal tables, their soft leather shoes kicking dust,
sending
puffs of dirt into the air. Selam descends towards a small window and a hungry dog gnawing on stone. She hears a string of prayers resting on the wings of a white-tailed swallow hurtling into the heavens. She listens, breaks the words apart, a mother once again, and hears a man, once God’s chosen, caught in the choke hold of despair.

FLAMES CHEWED INTO
a large portrait of Emperor Haile Selassie. A throng of people, those older draped in
shammas
and more hesitant, shoved closer into the wild circle, hypnotized by the embers that curdled and spewed. Some raised their fists and shouted, some stomped their feet, clouds of dust floated across wide-eyed faces. Others broke into ululations, and the shrill excited shrieks of children pierced the deepening celebratory rumble. Mercato’s open-air market was in chaos, vendors’ tables and goods cleared away to make room for the masses of people who ran and leapt and hugged each other. Solemn, cautious soldiers watched the crowds with blank faces, tanks behind them on the streets. A military truck screeched to a halt at a nearby office building and soldiers jumped out and ran in, their guns leading the way.

It was September 12, 1974, the first day of the new year, and Addis Ababa’s dreams and frustrations lay bare, finally exposed, to a hot sun that seemed brighter and more powerful than it had ever been before.

Hailu and Sara pushed through the people, bags of food in their arms.

“I don’t understand this,” Hailu said to Sara. “What do they think is going to happen now?”

They made their way to a street corner, under the shade of a tree, and stared at the flames leaping over the heads of onlookers. Planks of wood and more portraits burned in the middle of the circle. Heat shimmered in the air, giving the jubilant crowd the flatness of a mirage.

Hailu looked across the spectacle in shock. “I never imagined …” he began.

“Let’s keep moving,” Sara said. “These soldiers should do something.” She linked arms with Hailu and stepped closer to him. “What will they do next?” she said softly.

He glanced once more at the crowd. “Did they forget all the emperor has done for this country?”

—

TIZITA WAVED TO THEM
from the veranda, grinning and jumping up and down as Hailu pulled the car into the garage.

“I thought she was with Yonas,” Sara said, frowning. “She’s alone?”

“Emaye, watch!” Tizita called.

Sara walked towards her daughter and smiled. Tizita’s arms flapped like wings. “I can jump far,” she said. The veranda was four short steps.

Sara ruffled her hair. “Come inside, you can play with Sofia’s little boy, Berhane.”

Tizita twirled in circles. “I’m dizzy.”

THE SCREAM SCALED
the walls and exploded into every room. It held the panic of a trapped animal: high-pitched and agonized, sharpened by fear.

“What was that?” Hailu asked. They were in the kitchen waiting for Sofia to put her sons to sleep for a nap.