by Camilla Gibb
Robin puts his hand on my knee and keeps it there. I feel the heat of his palm tempting its way up my leg until an hour of performances later when the audience erupts with applause and everyone stands up and his hand falls away.
Sitta and Ahmed jump up and down in front of their parents.
“Was I good, Mama?” Ahmed asks, his arms around her waist.
“You were the best,” she says, kissing the top of his head.
“What about me?” Sitta cries, squirming out from her father’s embrace.
“I could hear your voice singing like an angel above all the others!”
This exchange is echoed throughout the room in twenty-four different languages. It’s an audience full of saris and hijabs and kente cloth, a United Nations of proud mothers. The men are few and far between—at evening classes, on assembly lines, driving taxis, frying fish or behind bars in faraway prisons.
The conversation spills out onto the street. But here the noise of the crowd subsides, and the voice of one man dominates. A beefy Englishman with a shaved head is poking a small Nigerian man in the shoulder.
When the Nigerian man steps backward, several other men rush forward. Punches and accusations start to fly, and Amina and I pull the children back.
“Come on, kids.” We tug as they stare.
But Yusuf remains standing there. Immobile at the edge of a fight in which all men in the vicinity are now engaged with their fists.
“Yusuf!” Amina calls, but he is fixated on the spectacle of falling bodies, unable to move or speak.
Robin takes him by the elbow. Yusuf allows himself to be led away.
I thank Robin for escorting Yusuf back and say goodnight.
“Look, I’ve seen the building now, if that’s what you were worried about,” he says, no doubt fishing for an invitation up for a cup of tea.
I’ve tried to picture him inside—walking down the concrete corridor, entering my flat, sitting down on the sofa and sipping tea, putting his cup down on the floor, reaching to take my hand, pulling me close, kissing my mouth—and it all works for about a second but then I open my eyes. It’s the wrong man. At the wrong moment. In the wrong place.
This building is for men like Yusuf, easing their way back into the world, and men like Aziz, whose absences haunt the halls, and the women who love them. It’s the only place we can define as our own, where we can give up the language, the reserve, the protocol, the niceties that England requires. Where we are protected.
“But how can I get to know you if you won’t even let me see where you live?” Robin asks, and quickly apologizes, reaching out and gently squeezing the back of my neck. “I just want to get to know you better,” he says.
It sounds so simple. To want. To want what is before you in the here and now.
“I really like you.”
But you know so little about me, I think, overwhelmed by his directness. He must look at me and imagine something whole.
“I like you too, Robin,” I manage to say.
I do and it feels absolutely terrible.
Yusuf retreats inward again. I’m not sure he is a man who would use his fists; rather, it’s the loss of his voice that seems to have broken him. And he has a beautiful voice: lilting and mellifluous. I have no doubt he was a poet in the world of agricultural economics. He was renowned as a teacher, Amina tells me, and while the primary language of instruction at the college was English, Yusuf joined the campaign to codify Oromiffa in the early 1970s, giving a script to an oral language with more than thirty million speakers. He even produced a couple of pamphlets about pesticides in Oromiffa, but with its liberal definition of propaganda, the Dergue condemned these as incendiary tracts designed to rouse counterrevolutionary sentiment among those who tilled the land.
It became clear fairly early on that the relations of power in Ethiopia had not fundamentally changed with the revolution. The Dergue is dominated by Amharas, just as Haile Selassie’s empire was. Adopting their language and culture remains the only way to get ahead.
I wonder if Yusuf will teach his children to write in Oromiffa one day, but right now he can’t even tell them bedtime stories. Amina is losing patience. She tells me that the other day a car backfired in the street below and Yusuf hurled himself on the floor and tried to crawl under the sofa. The children had laughed.
Amina has boundless empathy for everyone but her husband, it seems. How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It’s like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud.
Yusuf is watching children’s television with the curtains drawn. He holds a cold cup of tea in his hands. I should get to work, but I take the cup from his hands and place it on the kitchen counter. I wash my hands and cover my hair, take the Qur’an from the shelf, kneel down on the floor and begin the story of the child Moses—Musa, as we know him—raised in exile among the pharaohs.
The message I mean to impart, of the many messages the story of Musa offers, is that God sometimes puts us in alien and difficult situations, and in time, the adversity of our situation may be revealed to be a blessing in disguise. It occurs to me I should remind myself of this more often.
Yusuf takes the book from my hands, about to continue from where I left off.
“The children are good with the Qur’an, aren’t they?” he says bittersweetly.
I nod. “They are.”
“I’m grateful to you, Lilly. It is as if you are doing my job in my absence.”
part six
harar, ethiopia
MARCH-JULY 1974
a crack in the holy armor
There was comfort in the order and predictability of our world. Ours was a city of ninety-nine mosques and more than three hundred saints, their shrines organized along seven concentric circles. There were five gates punctuating the city wall and five raised clay platforms in Harari houses, just as our days revolved around five daily prayers and our lives were governed by the five pillars of faith.
The certainty of our world was reinforced at the beginning of every new day as we woke with the call to prayer. Every day, that is, but one. One strange Wednesday in March of 1974, Sheikh Jami Abdullah Rahman, feared and revered community leader and spiritual guide, descendant and disciple of the city’s patron saint, mentor of generations of men pursuing the mystical path, all-powerful patriarch and husband of Fatima, Zehtahoun and Gishta, father of twenty-two children and grandfather of nearly fifty, did not wake up for the first time in sixty-seven years.
The sheikh was attuned to waking to a particular chorus, the certain density of a hundred voices less one, but that morning one less muezzin made the call to prayer. Sheikh Jami did not rise, and as a consequence, no one else in the household did either.
Gishta told us she awoke to a silence so eerie she wondered if Judgment Day was upon us. She put her ear to her door, listening for the sound of the sheikh sliding the thick bolt across the adjoining wooden doors that separated him and his sons from the women and their daughters in their houses on the other side of the courtyard.
Gishta listened for the sound of her husband relieving himself in an empty bucket behind the woodshed, the familiar ting of his urine pelting metal. She braced herself for the blistering screech of the sheikh shifting the heavy lid that covered the oil drum before he scooped out water for his ablutions. She waited for the sounds of her husband snorting and spitting as he washed, but there was nothing that morning, only silence.
None of the wives opened their doors, for it was customary for them to do so only after Sheikh Jami and his apprentices, Hussein and Idris, had finished. But by the time the women finally heard the sheikh, it was too late for them to make the trek to the farmlands. The waxy qat leaves would have already lost their early-morning tenderness. To pick them that late in the morning would have been to waste them, to leave them wilting in their hands while brokers and customers made snide remarks and handed their money to others.
The Oromo farmers who awaited the sheikh’s wives every morning eventually realized the women weren’t coming, for rumour had it that they decided to chew the equivalent of a day’s haul between them, getting so high that they forgot to weed and water instead, and spent the day engaged in their second-favorite pastime: discussing their fantasies of peasant revolt. The brokers who usually distributed the sheikh’s wives’ qat to the sellers stomped their feet and threatened never to do business with these three women again. The girls who sold for these brokers suffered the brunt of this, being harassed by the increasingly wild-eyed and squirrelly addicts who had been waiting for their qat all morning.
Because the women did not go to market that morning, they didn’t buy any meat or vegetables for dinner. They watered down the remains of the stew from the day before, and the children complained they were still hungry. The women, who were never restrained about meting out physical punishment, gave more than one child a few rough slaps to stop their whining.
But not everyone could be silenced with a slap. There was nothing to leave out for the hyenas that night. The hyenas were used to being fed well in the lane in front of the shrine. Feeding the hyenas was incumbent upon each of us. This was an unspoken and highly ritualized agreement. The hyenas paced back and forth all night, refusing to disappear. No one in the compound enjoyed the relief of the retreat of their anguished cries as the sun rose the next morning. Gishta said she could hear them circling, their breathing thick with anger.
She and her co-wives were afraid to leave the compound. Their fears were confirmed by the discovery that the Somali girl who brought them fresh camel’s milk early each day had been mauled to death and devoured in the lane.
Gishta’s failure to turn up at our compound was one of several clues that something was not right. Three of my students did not show up for class for a second day in a row. Anwar came back empty handed from the market where we’d sent him to buy some milk from the Somali women. And then that Thursday night, en route to the shrine, we didn’t hear drumbeats. Some people stayed home, sensing it was a bad omen; others, Nouria and I among them, carried on, only to find the door to the compound locked. We heard rumors that the shrine had been closed all day—the first time this had happened in living memory. We turned back and headed for home.
When Gishta finally turned up at our compound on Friday, she told us of the mother who had brought her sickly newborn to be blessed the day before. The woman had interpreted the locked door as a sign that the child was possessed by the jinn and had taken him to a spiritual healer to be exorcised. There were stories of pilgrims who had walked thirty-six miles from the countryside and had had no choice but to walk, unblessed, the thirty-six miles back home. There was a rumor that a young man had come seeking a blessing because he had lost an eye in an accident. He went home believing he was destined to be blind and poked out his other eye with a stick. Every visitor that day had been forced to question whether they had offended the saint, whether they had fallen out of God’s favor.
Rumors spread from Sheikh Jami’s compound to neighboring compounds, from muezzin to muezzin, from the peasants who worked Uncle Jami’s land to the peasants on neighboring lands, from the qat sellers who normally sold qat brought by Sheikh Jami’s wives to all the other sellers in the Faras Magala, from the pilgrims who returned unsatisfied from Bilal al Habash’s shrine to their families and neighbors, and in a town where there were only two degrees of separation between the most beautiful girl and the ugliest man, the current of whispers had washed over the entire city in a mere three days.
When Gishta finally came to see us, our suspicions were confirmed. Somehow, over the course of those few days in March of 1974, in a city that had survived for centuries, enduring war, famine, pestilence, foreign invasion, destruction of an emirate and incorporation into a Christian empire, everything had begun to unravel.
It was as if the guardian spell had finally been broken; there was a crack in the holy armor that protected us.
the shrunken heads of enemy invaders
The events of the week did not prevent us from holding our bercha, though we were all unsettled. But where I was concerned about the kink in the holy armor that surrounded the city, Aziz and Munir appeared, as usual, to have more secular concerns.
Munir was all nervous energy. He and Aziz had heard of protests in the capital, university students leading demonstrations, people raising their voices in anger against the emperor.
“But people worship him like a God,” I said, thinking of the images we saw on television every Saturday: people throwing themselves on the ground and kissing his feet. Kissing the pavement he had walked upon. Kissing the tracks left in the dirt by his passing convoy.
“They’ve made him into a God,” said Munir.
“Come on, Munir,” Aziz objected. “You make it sound like it is the people who have given him this power.”
“Well, haven’t they?” Munir asked.
“He’s created this mythology around himself in order to instill fear,” said Aziz. “The Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, God’s Elect, the King of Kings, Might of the Trinity, all this business.”
I had certainly been afraid of the emperor: his reputation inspires it. The palace was a shrine to his greatness, with his coronation robes, his military uniforms, his wall of medals, orders and decorations, and the shrunken heads of ancient enemy invaders all on display in glass cases. His greatness was reinforced by all that surrounded him, including a veritable solar system of ministers and servants. To request an audience to offer him a simple thank-you, I had been forced to make an appointment with the venerable minister of the pen.
“You have a matter of business you would like to discuss with His Most Beneficent Majesty?” a tall man with a long, sad face had asked with all the gravity in the world.
“Well, not exactly business . . .”
“A matter of a personal nature?”
“I just wanted to say thank you, really. I wondered whether there might be a convenient time for me to do that.”
“Well,” the minister had said, clearing his throat. “After breakfast the emperor does his calisthenics and then he takes his walk through the zoological gardens. Then he goes to his office at the Jubilee Palace. He takes some requests from the soliciting masses at the gates en route to the Audience Hall, where his ministers await him for nine o’-clock. Nine to ten A.M. is the Hour of Assignments. When the hour is finished and all the assignments have been handed out, he moves on to the Golden Hall for the Hour of the Cashbox, where His August Majesty considers the requests of his subjects. At eleven, the Hour of the Ministers begins, and the emperor turns his most brilliant mind to imperial matters. At noon, the emperor dons his judge’s robes and opens the Hour of Supreme Court of Final Appeal. Then at one, the emperor returns here for a brief dinner with his family before resuming his station in the afternoon to preside over the Hours of Improvements, Corrections, Relations and Commissions. Then, after a light supper, he retires.”
“I see,” I responded, slightly concerned that the minister had not taken a breath. “So you’re telling me there is no good time?”
“I am telling you that unless you are a minister or a general, a family member, a zoological specimen, a subject or a criminal, there is no hour into which you fit. Unless, of course, you are a visiting dignitary.”
As a concession the minister agreed to convey our thanks, though I have no assurance that he ever did. I have no certainty the emperor ever knew of our presence in the palace, whether the letter from Muhammed Bruce had ever even reached his hands. It had been passed from guard to guard and ended up on the desk of the palace secretary. He had escorted us into Miriam’s care. In any case, the next day, the minister delivered notice of our travel arrangements. We would be leaving for Harar the following morning in one of the twenty-seven cars of the imperial fleet.
I had been struck by the driver’s comment that the Muslims and Christians of Harar were linked in an embrace. I
had grown up with the sense that Christians were not enemies but rather people who had missed the last word of God. People more to be pitied and educated than condemned. We were all believers in the book, Christians, Muslims and Jews, but our version carried on for six more centuries. We had a responsibility to share this information with others.
But in Sudan we’d witnessed a Muslim government killing its fellow Christian citizens. And here, our city was surrounded by armed Amharas living in the corrugated-tin settlements on the nearby hills. If this was an embrace, rather than the circle of love I had imagined, it looked more like a barbed wire fence. Perhaps this is why Aziz had suggested I not imply any connection to the emperor: the words didn’t quite match the pictures. Like the Christian church in the center of the city. It was hardly a gift to the people of Harar; it was a garish reminder of conquest standing in aggressive opposition to its surroundings. What else can it mean when the tallest building in a city of Muslims is a church?
Munir’s shoulders slackened. “It works both ways, I suppose. People invest him with power but he certainly has his own . . . I don’t know the word exactly, maybe magic. Part of it is legend, myth, whatever you want to call it, but part of it is definitely his personality. Especially the way he handles the West. He has completely charmed them. I just don’t see who has the personality to succeed him after his death.”
Certainly not his son, Asfa Wossen, who I gathered from what Tawfiq was saying had tried to overthrow his father a few years ago. Apparently the prince had recruited people directly from the palace, members of Haile Selassie’s very own Imperial Guard, decrying his father’s regime as one governed by ego and nepotism. He said his father had no real interest in developing the country and alleviating poverty, only in increasing the wealth and privilege of the aristocracy by keeping ordinary civilians destitute.
