Beneath the Lion's Gaze Read online

  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.

  They were on a smoother road now, rocky bumps giving way to a paved flatness that was far less damaging to his tires. If he had been alone, he would have sped up, but he wanted to linger in this moment in the car with his son and hear him talk of better days.

  Along the side of the road, street vendors were taking down their stalls for the day, pulling ou
t their long poles from the ground, folding large plastic sheets that served as awning against rain. Hawkers called out reduced prices on their wares, competing for attention in the noise and congestion. One young woman delicately balanced a baby on her hip as she arranged her neatly stacked rows of cinnamon sticks and berbere on a thin cloth in front of her, the bags of crushed red pepper bright as rubies. Shoeshine boys planted on every street corner squatted and whistled at businessmen rushing towards crowded parking lots. A lone voice climbed above the din and clamor, a prayer, and for a moment, a deep hush fell upon the scene and all that was heard were the churnings of engines.

  They were approaching Yekatit 12 Martyrs’ Square at Sidist Kilo, near Haile Selassie University where Yonas taught history and Dawit was studying in the law program. In the square was an obelisk monument that honored the victims of an Italian-era massacre. At the top of the obelisk, a stone lion gazed proudly across the city, defiant. Four imposing tanks rested at each corner of the intersection. Two soldiers paced, their gazes lifting from their shoes as Hailu drove by. They watched the Volkswagen pass, then turned their attention back to their boots.

  “They’re younger than some of the university students they’re supposed to be watching,” Yonas said. “Boys.” There was an overturned bus in the distance and a small crowd of street boys milling around with stones in their hands, kept at bay by soldiers’ kicks.

  Hailu knew if Dawit had been there, he would have said something, would have made a passionate declaration about the need for a new constitution and freedom of expression, for land reform that gave the farmer ownership of what he tilled, for the removal of an old, tired monarch. But he wasn’t, and there was nothing in the brief pause that followed Yonas’s words but the rumble and rattle of trucks and cars whizzing past them and out of sight. Hailu slowed to let a young boy and his sheep pass. He stared at his hands, age spots now dotting the skin above his wrist, and he thought back to the day he first saw Selam’s tattoos, inked into her hands a week before their wedding.

  “It’s God’s mark on me,” she’d said, blushing as he ran a thumb over a tattoo that was as green as a fresh leaf. “It keeps evil away.”

  His own mother had similar crosses gracing the lines of her jaw, but he’d wanted to goad the young girl into showing the temper her older brothers complained about. “What if I don’t want a wife with a cross carved into her skin?”

  “I’ll tell my father to find someone else for me. He’ll choose another man.”

  “And what if no one wants a rejected girl?” He had been a brash student, feeling very bold in front of this beautiful girl from his village.

  She stayed calm. “God doesn’t take without giving.” Even back then, her confidence had shaken his.

  “God doesn’t take without giving,” Hailu repeated now to himself, wishing he could summon up her certainty.

  “Did you say something, Abbaye?” Yonas asked.

  “Your mother’s tattoos, the crosses,” Hailu said. “I love them, I always have.” He shook his head, and drove the rest of the way in silence.

  YONAS HAD EXPECTED his father to disappear into his office and change into his white coat as soon as he entered the hospital, to perhaps tuck his prayer beads into the large pocket in front, then hide his anxiety behind a professional demeanor. Instead, Hailu took the beads out of his pocket the moment he stepped out of the car. He held them in plain sight. Then he headed for Selam’s room and became just another nervous husband on his way to see his wife, his steps so wide and fast that Yonas was left several paces behind him.

  In the hospital room, in a small bed tucked beneath a small window, Selam slept with an IV snaking out of her thin arm. She was dressed in a blue hospital gown. Her gold cross necklace rested on a chest that rose and sank with the help of an oxygen tank. Hailu stood by her feet, poring over her medical chart. Yonas reached for her hands. He kissed the tattoos on the back of her wrists, and he closed his eyes.

  I told your father these crosses needed their own space, his mother said to him long ago, holding up her wrists and angling the inked crosses into the sun. Yonas had been forced to squint against the light that seeped into the prayer room adjoining his parents’ master bedroom. I told him he must build me a room big enough for the angels that watched over me, a place we could talk. Selam said this with a teasing smile, but as a young boy, Yonas had believed her and he’d held his own hands into the sun and wondered if his wrists, absent of crosses, were also worthy of holy ground. The story his mother told was that his father built the prayer room for her. Carved the space out of their large bedroom and erected a wall and door to mark where holy ground began and the physical world ended.

  His father had traveled the 748 kilometers from Addis Ababa back to Selam’s former home in Gondar, in northern Ethiopia, to find the wood to make the door. He used the bark from the largest tree on her father’s land. It had roots that dug into the earth like hungry fingers, and I wanted to make a door from a tree that refused to let go of life, Hailu once said. He brought the trunk back himself, tied to the top of his first car, a two-door with a grumbling engine, then dragged it on horseback from Debre Markos when the car had stalled on the treacherous winding roads back to Addis Ababa. The door was thick and knotted, it held scars that polishing could not remove, and Hailu allowed no one else to construct and cut it into shape. The last bit of wood from the tree was used to make the long rectangular table that was the prayer room’s only piece of furniture.

  Yonas was a thirty-two-year-old man now, with a daughter and a wife, but he knelt in the prayer room every day, held his naked wrists to the sun, and wondered again about his worthiness. His mother had been in the hospital for a week, but the slowing down of her heart had started years before. He alone witnessed the countless afternoons she came into the prayer room to weep by herself, unaware that her eldest son was pressed against the thick wooden door, listening. He was also the only one who knew that she’d stopped taking the medicine his father prescribed for her heart. He’d caught her throwing her daily dose down the sink one day, and had been so shocked and confused he’d merely stood there and stared. She’d looked up to find him, and given him a slow smile of resignation.

  “My son,” she’d said, her hand gently twisting the pill cap on. “You understand, don’t you?” The light from the morning sun had been cold and gray on her face. “I’m tired of fighting what God wants.”

  She’d hugged him, then gone downstairs to make his father coffee. Selam had needed no words from him, had asked for nothing except silence from this son who abhorred lying. And it was this silence that fed a guilt that had become nearly unbearable as he watched his mother grow sicker and his father become more desperate to keep her alive. He let the soft ache in his chest die away before opening his eyes.

  His mother was stirring, her expression changing from placid to tense. Her eyes were closed but she turned her head towards the window, then hid her face in her pillow with a sharp jerk of her neck.

  “Emaye,” Yonas said, laying a hand on her shoulder, “are you dreaming?”

  Hailu moved to her side and held her face in both hands, cupping it tenderly. “Emebet, my lady,” he said, “it’s the medication. It’s not real. Wake up.” He glanced at the heart monitor, watched its rhythm increase. “Wake up, Selam. I’m here.”

  “Is she in pain, Abbaye?” Yonas asked. “Should I go get the nurse?”

  “She’s just waking up, that’s all.” Hailu kissed her cheek. “Selam.”

  She opened her eyes, recognition softening her frown. She looked around her. “Am I still in the hospital?” she asked. Her large eyes, her most striking feature, were focused on Hailu, who lowered his gaze to check her pulse. She looked around the room. “Why?” She let a finger trace the oxygen tube to her nose.

  Hailu put her hand down. “You’re getting better,” he said. He cleared his throat and looked again at the medical chart, stern and professional. “The medicine will work. It’s just a matter of tim
e. I’m watching the dosage.”

  Selam looked at Yonas and took his hand. “Your father made me a promise, did you know this?” She had set her full mouth in the stubborn line Yonas recognized as one of his own angry gestures. “When we first married—”

  “Selam,” Hailu cut in, “this isn’t the time. You need rest and you need to eat.” He walked to the door and pointed at the bed. “I’m getting Almaz, she’ll get your food ready.” He walked out, running a hand over his face then letting it move to the back of his neck and knead tired muscles.

  She looked at Yonas. “Yonnie, I want to rest, you know this. Talk to him.” Her eyes were pleading, desperate.

  Yonas patted her hand. “God knows what to do, Emaye,” he said. “More than we do.” He dipped his head and hoped she didn’t notice the way he grimaced as he leaned in to kiss her.

  “Dawit, tell him for me—” she said, then stopped. “Where’s my other son?” She tried to rise and groaned in frustration at the tubes that stopped her. “Dawit’s not here?”

  Yonas brushed her hair from her forehead and kissed her cheek, he rested his face against hers. “Emaye,” he said affectionately. “Emama.” He heard above his head, through the small window, the faint sound of a car door slamming, a goatherd’s whistle, the padded thump of a noise that could have been a distant rock thrown, a distant shout, another rifle discharging above the heads of restless students marching forward. “He’ll come,” Yonas said, because there was nothing else to say.

  4.

  SARA HEARD THE gate creak open and keys rattle. She wondered who was foolish enough to wander outside after sundown since patrol cars had begun to roam through the neighborhood. The police were everywhere these days, looking for possible suspects in the rash of bus burnings and shop lootings that had been taking place around the city. These bold acts of violence and rebellion, growing increasingly more persistent, kept most citizens locked behind closed doors once the sun dropped into the horizon. An unnatural quiet now descended on Addis Ababa’s nights. She heard the side door groan open and soft footfalls in the corridor. Dawit. She checked the clock above the TV; it was close to seven. Soon the family would be sitting around the television trying to ignore Dawit’s silence and Hailu’s stares.