Читать книгу The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance - Philip Marsden - Страница 7

Addis Ababa was always a dog city. You’d hear them at night, after curfew, ranging the empty streets in yelping packs. Sometimes there would be the sound of a military Jeep and the stutter of gunfire, but once it had gone, it left just the sound of the running dogs. It was said they were the guard dogs and pedigree pets of the old nobility—those families whom the revolution had chased abroad or imprisoned or shot. It was also said that during the Red Terror they had developed a taste for human flesh.

There were still stray dogs. But the years in between had levelled the pedigrees to a sort of uni-dog. The sounds of the night now were more varied—screeching cats, night traffic, and at dawn the sound of a dozen muezzin echoing through the city. The churches’ amplified prayers began a little later.

One morning I revisited the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. I used to spend days up in the empty reading room, countering the fear and reticence of Addis with the enthusiasm of previous generations of travellers, historians and archaeologists. The institute was housed in the emperor’s first palace. Under the Derg, Haile Selassie’s private quarters were closed off, but now, at the end of a corridor behind the museum, I found myself in the empress’s bedroom. Across the hall were the emperor’s own rooms, and in his bathroom I met a man who for thirty years had worked as his valet.

Our voices echoed off the marble surfaces. Through the window, students went to and fro beneath the date palms. Mammo Haile had chaotic teeth, a hangdog expression, and an undimmed devotion to his master.

‘Day and night His Majesty thought only about his people. He was always thinking how to develop them. I have such a deep emotion when I think of him.’ Mammo Haile looked away. ‘His Majesty had a special way with dogs. If we were travelling and he saw some stray dogs he would say, Mammo Haile, please round up those dogs! I want to give them breads. His Majesty’s favourite dog was Lulu.’

I had seen a picture of Lulu sitting in the emperor’s lap while he stroked her with his small, feminine hands. She was a tiny, frog-eyed Chihuahua.

‘If there was a reception Lulu would go round among the legs of the officials. If one of them was holding a bad feeling about His Majesty, Lulu would touch the man’s foot and that was how His Majesty knew. One minister was very popular but Lulu touched his foot and after that no one trusted that man again. Lulu was a very brilliant dog.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Paul killed her.’

‘Paul?’

‘Big palace dog. Like a big fighter, like a wrestling man. He took Lulu by the neck and shook her and shook her. She was only a tiny dog—and finito! Lulu finito. Such a tiny little dog.’ He looked down, toeing the ground with his shoe. I thought he would cry.

‘It was only a year or two after that when they took His Majesty away.’

During that first week back in Addis someone gave me the name of Dejazmach Zewde Gabre-Selassie, who had been a minister under both the imperial regime and the Derg. He was the great-grandson of Emperor Yohannis IV, and was now living with a friend while he tried to get his own house back. ‘Wretched Derg confiscated it.’

Dejazmach Zewde was a charming, egg-shaped man with a marcel wave in his hair and a patrician manner. He had spent years as an academic in Oxford—‘I think my happiest years’—but a few months before the revolution, Haile Selassie had called him back to be Minister of the Interior.

‘It was my job to deal with the Derg. At that time I have to say they were really pretty amateurish. Used to park a tank outside the ministry for meetings, that sort of thing. Once they came to me and demanded the release of political prisoners. I said to them, Do you mean a complete amnesty, or some sort of selective policy? And they said, We don’t know.’ The dejazmach laughed. ‘They didn’t know! Well, come back when you do, I told them, and they just sat there. Well? I said. We can’t go back to barracks empty-handed. So I decided to call their bluff. Why not demand constitutional reform? Two weeks later they came back and said, We demand constitutional reform! So we appointed another committee to look at reform. Thought it might check the Derg’s power. Trouble is, the Derg started to arrest that committee.’

‘Did you know Mengistu?’

He nodded. ‘First time I met Mengistu was at a big meeting I called with the Derg. He was just a low officer then. Fifty members came and the senior ones were sitting and the rest were standing. One of those standing held up his hand. Minister, please, what do you think of socialism? he says. Well, I told him, there are different shades of socialism. In England there is Fabian socialism and then you have Swedish-style socialism and at the other end Albanian socialism. So if you mean policies aimed at achieving equality, I would say yes—but in general I am not for socialism.’

‘And that was Mengistu?’

‘That was him, yes.’

‘So what about the emperor?’ I asked. ‘Did you admire him?’

The dejazmach did not answer at once. He gazed up at the ceiling with such trance-like neutrality that I thought he hadn’t heard.

‘Earlier on, he was an astonishing figure. Decisive, effective, punctual. His greatest weakness was that he could not share power. I think that was it…Yet right at the end he had an amazing calm. Everyone else was nervous and jumpy, but he was calm. Just before he fell, I went to see him. The Derg were pretty much in control by then. They’d shown the Jonathan Dimbleby film exposing the famine, and said on television that no one should go to the palace, none of the workers or retainers. I was really very upset by the film—on the emperor’s behalf. So I went to see him. He was alone. The palace was completely empty. Just the two of us. He wanted to talk about foreign matters. I had just been in Iran and he said: So tell me, how is the shah? Two days later they took him away. They asked me to be foreign minister. I still thought it would all turn out all right, so I accepted. But then came Black Saturday.’

‘What was that?’

‘Hauled sixty of those out of the cellar beneath the throne room and shot them. I was in New York when I heard. Resigned at once.’

Two days later, through a coffee merchant, I was introduced to the emperor’s grandson. Prince Ba’eda Maryam Makonnen had a business importing coffee machines. He was an ordinary looking Ethiopian in a zip-up cardigan—but on his index finger he wore a signet ring with a gold relief of a lion and staff, the Conquering Lion of the King of Judah.

Ba’eda was the son of Haile Selassie’s favourite child, the Duke of Harar, who had been killed in a car crash when Ba’eda was only fourteen days old. With his brothers and sisters he had then gone to live with his grandfather in the Jubilee Palace. Later he was one of those imprisoned in the Ghibbi, the Grand Palace.

‘When we were in prison Mengistu came to see us. He was always very polite. He called my grandfather Getay—master—and always made sure to salute him.’

In the end Ba’eda was moved to the cellar beneath the throne room. He passed me on to another of its inmates. I went to see Teshome Gabre-Maryam on a warm, sunny afternoon. He had served in the emperor’s government and was now a prosperous lawyer. He worked in an office in the leafy compound of his home. When I arrived he was with another man, General Negussie Wolde-Mikhael.

Thirty years of power shifts had seesawed the lives of these two men. They had both begun their careers under the emperor. They were both high-fliers: Teshome had helped draft the constitution, General Negussie was chief of police in Addis. But when the Derg came, it had imprisoned one and promoted the other. While Teshome counted off the months and years in the palace cellar, General Negussie was made Chief Justice of the Martial Court.

‘One day, they took me for trial,’ explained Teshome. He reached out and, with a smile, took the general’s hand. ‘Who was there presiding in the court?’ He raised the general’s hand. ‘He could have had me executed!’

‘Why did you let him off?’ I asked, smiling.

The general glanced at Teshome. ‘He was a lawyer. He stood up in the court and convinced me.’

‘That he was innocent?’

‘No—that the court had no validity.’

Teshome laughed. He was still holding the general’s hand.

Teshome was released, and when the Derg fell General Negussie himself was imprisoned. He had only just been released. Now Teshome was helping him; he had given him a car.

‘Did you approve of the Derg?’ I turned to General Negussie.

‘To begin with, I was very happy with the ideology. We really believed it would help Ethiopia. But for me it changed completely when they executed my uncle. I was so filled with anger—I wanted to kill every one of those Derg men. My colleagues suggested I apply for a transfer. They probably saved my life. For six and a half years I was administrator of Hararge region. Then in 1982 the Derg asked me to become a minister—Minister without Portfolio.’

‘Did you accept?’

He shrugged. ‘I had ten children.’

‘What do you remember of Mengistu?’

‘Very moody. Very violent. My office was just above his and I could always hear his shouting. The only quality I know he had was that he loved his country. Also he was not corrupted at all. He was very honest with money. And he was very good at listening. He always knew exactly what the important point was.’

‘Did you admire him?’

He looked at me. Prison had greyed his hair; his face was soft and troubled. ‘Every day I was with Mengistu, I was thinking: how can I kill this man? We were always searched before going to our office. But when I was alone with him I would watch him and think how could I do it—he was a small one and I am a judo expert. I travelled with him to different provinces and I sat behind him on the plane looking at the back of his head and he had one little scar just here—’ the general leaned forward and tapped the top of his neck ‘- and I was thinking, that would be the place, that would do it. A bullet just there…’

General Negussie stood and said goodbye. He walked stiffly to the door. For a moment after he had gone, Teshome and I were silent. A yellow weaver bird was pecking at the windowpane—tap-tap…tap-tap-tap.

Teshome and I carried on talking. I told him about my first trip to Lake Tana, about Wonderland Tours and Teklu and Dr Mengesha.

‘Mengesha Gabre-Hiwot?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was brought up with him! We were classmates at Tafari Makonnen school. He helped me. He gave me money when I came out of prison in September 1982.’

‘That was a few weeks after I was here.’

The weaver bird was again tapping at the window— sparring with an aggressor that matched him blow for blow.

Teshome pursed his lips and let out a long, frustrated ’Dhaaaaa…’ for all the shattered years, the Derg’s brutalities, the squandered hopes of his own generation.

‘Do you know what happened to him, Teshome, why he was detained?’

‘Do I know?’ He looked at me blankly, then nodded. ‘They said he read and distributed some anti-Derg literature.’

‘Did he?’

‘Actually he did, yes. In fact he showed it to me and I was very nearly imprisoned again as a result. It was also a time that the TPLF was advancing—so of course Tigrayans were not that popular.’

The weaver bird was still attacking its glass opponent—tap-tap…tap-tap-tap…

‘What happened in the end?’

‘They tortured him. He got gangrene in his leg—they had to amputate it. The gangrene was also in the other leg, and they had to amputate that one too. In fact, he was given permission to go home. But someone apparently said: What will people say when they see him with no legs? Much easier to kill him. They took him to a place on the edge of Addis known as “Bermuda”—the Bermuda Triangle. When people went there they nevercame back. They killed him there.

‘Mengesha was one of the best, one of the most decent individuals you could ever imagine.’ Teshome pressed his fists hard on the desk. For a moment he looked overwhelmed by his own anger. ‘That was the worst of it. They took men like that and destroyed them. Those animals.’

I had kept an image in my mind all those years, an everyday Ethiopian image glanced from a bus window. It was of a farmer, bare-legged, his dula flexed across his shoulders, setting off on a narrow path across the plateau.

Ethiopia taught me many things. As a naïve twenty-one-year-old, with years of flunked schooling behind me, I was ready for the simplest of lessons. Instead I was presented with paradoxes. I learnt of the cruelty that could be perpetrated in the name of a good idea. I saw how a people hurtling towards catastrophe, hungry, with population growth out of control, could go on living day to day with such astonishing grace. I saw how those apparently ignored by divine goodness could still apply their greatest energy to worship. I learnt that the human spirit is more robust than life itself.

Ethiopia opened my eyes to the earth’s limitless range. I pictured the country’s startling scenes and stories multiplied across the globe, then factored up by the past. It made the notion of ‘a small world’, ‘a shrinking world’, look absurd, and it made me restless.

Ethiopia instilled in me the habit of a lifetime, the habit of travel. It revealed the rewards that can be had simply from being footloose among strangers, from taking remote and narrow paths with bare-legged farmers. It bred in me the conviction that if there is any purpose to our time on this earth, it is to understand it, to seek out its diversity, to celebrate its heroes and its wonders—in short, to witness it.

There is a saying in Ethiopia: ‘Kes be kes inculal bekuro yihedal‘ (’Step by step the egg starts walking’). My Amharic teacher would use it whenever I showed signs of frustration. I was a hopeless pupil; he used the expression very often. But now, after twenty-one years, the egg was hatching. I would go north into the roadless heart of the country, set off across the plateau. I would go to the places first conjured up by Teklu that afternoon in Mengistu’s stifled city, with the rain hammering on the tin roof. I would go to Lalibela, to the sacred city of Aksum, and I would walk between them.

‘Walk?’ spluttered an Ethiopian friend. ‘You can’t walk! Foreigners don’t walk.’

Walking was what villagers did. They walked and walked, to find grazing, to church, to market, to clinics. Until the nineteenth century wheels were unknown in the highlands. They still are in most places—no barrows, no carts; just legs and shoulders and mule-backs and the glimpse of a government or NGO’s 4×4 as it races by, leaving you coughing in its dust-wake.

I made plans. I began the Ethiopian game in which information, misinformation and pure fantasy are all cunningly dressed up as each other. With such distances, I asked, might it be better to ride? Yes, ride, ride—on a horse! No (there are no horses, not up to the terrain). Should I go alone? Yes, yes—all alone! No (suspicious villagers would march you straight into the first town). Is it safe? (Very safe, no bandits/you will need one unit of armed guards). Is there food? (No food/lots of food). The truth was that no one knew anything other than a couple of the towns on my route.

I found a tent, bought a kerosene stove and stocked up with packet soup and sardines. I tracked down a Tigrinya-speaking guide named Hiluf in Aksum; I asked him to take a bus and meet me in Lalibela. I prised a map from the appropriate government agency.

One morning, I climbed the hill to Giorgis cathedral. It was not yet eight. The crowds were flooding up past the equestrian statue of Emperor Menelik. We were pressed closer and closer together, swept forward on an unstoppable tide. The octagonal church rose from a mass of white gabbis. All around me people were in various states of rapture. Some men were dancing. Others bowed their heads. Women stood in tears. From the steps, a flop-haired hermit delivered a eulogy to the dual virginity of Mary: ‘There is nothing that equals her glory. She is higher than all creatures, men as well as angels! Her dress is the sun with the moon beneath her feet…‘ Amputees dragged themselves among the worshippers’ legs. A group of boys had climbed into the trees to watch. It could have been the fifteenth century, or any century.

Giorgis cathedral was the first place I ever saw the spectacle of Ethiopian worship. I had come here with Teklu on my second day in Addis. After a lifetime of sober grey churches and bloodless rite, I was astonished. Christianity to me was something dusty and ossified, but not here. Over the years, the Ethiopian Church came to distil for me all that was extraordinary and ageless about the country. After my first visit, I thought you only had to step out over the threshold of Europe to be faced with such a sight. Now I know that that is only partly true. There is nowhere else on earth quite like Ethiopia.

The next morning, with 130 pounds of equipment and food, I flew to Lalibela.