Читать книгу The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance - Philip Marsden - Страница 8

An hour before dawn and Lalibela’s rock-cut trenches are dark as oil. Their high sides rise to a narrow strip of stars. Underfoot the tufa is rough and pitted. I steady myself with a hand on the cold walls. The night air is sharp against my nostrils. Along the tunnel from the church of Debra Sina comes the nasal sound of chanting. Each phrase lasts a minute. Then—boooom!—the first beat of the kebbero. It is a sound like no other. It strikes you somewhere deep in the thorax. Another beat, and I quicken my pace.

Far below ground level, the base of the church rises from its own plinth of bedrock. Sandals are heaped by the door. Light glows from keel-arch windows. Inside is warmth, the smell of an all-night presence. Dozens of people are wrapped in white gabbis. Some are no more than shapes on the floor; others are standing heron-still around the central bay. On sturdy columns can be seen the chisel-cuts in the rock. The columns rise to shallow cupolas. Far beneath them two drummers squat beside their kebberos. Slowly, alternately, with the flat of their hands, they are beating the goatskin tympana.

The debtara are standing over them. They are elongated figures in white turbans and hanging white shawls. They are chanting. The drums beat, the debtara drop their wrists and their handheld sistra rattle like coins.

One of the drummers gives a quick, double bo-boom! The other follows. The tempo increases. One by one the shapes rise from the floor. In two lines the debtara shuffle towards each other. Their prayer sticks cluster above them. At the exact moment they begin the dance, a blind cantor steps to the front, his mouth open in song. He is wearing a pair of women’s dark glasses. The drummers are standing now. Each kebbero hangs from a shoulder-strap. They circle each other. They give two more double beats. Rhythmic clapping spreads through the church. One of the drummers leans to the right, the other to the left. Now they are spinning. They are crouching, rising. Their faces glow with abandon. The people press closer around them. The cupolas fill with ululations. The drummers’ eyes flash in the half-light. The debtara are swinging the prayer sticks now, surrounding the drummers in their ecstasy of beating. A young boy joins their line, his head level with the men’s hips. He is imitating their movements.

Out of nowhere, a man leaps into the midst. His matted hair swings from side to side. He dips his cross-staff above his head. His movements are fluent and precise. A grin splits his skull-like face. The boy has stopped dancing. He is standing still, buffeted and jostled by those around him. He is staring at the man, and his eyes are wide with fear and amazement.

No force on earth could stop this. The man is revolving around the drummers. Sweat flicks from his hair. Deep below

the ground, the hollowed-out chapel is filled with drumming, filled with clapping, filled with ululating, and it all merges in a fever of sound and movement and devotion.

Then it is over. The drummers are lifting the kebberos over their heads. The debtaras‘ sistra tinkle as they set them down. Two priests are involved in a hissed argument, flicking through a psalter. The shapes on the floor are re-forming themselves. The man with matted locks has disappeared.

Outside again, dawn is a pale loom above the trench. It is still cold. From the distance comes the sound of a tirumba, the funereal horn—and a cry: ‘Citizens of Lalibela! Come out—come out! Come and help bury the body of Colonel Melaku. Citizens of Lalibela, come out, come out!‘

Lalibela is a town to die in. The tunnels that once linked the complex of churches are clogged with centuries of corpses. To make a pilgrimage to Lalibela eases your later passage to heaven—but to die here is much better. The soil itself is sacred, and those who take the journey are buried in shallow graves.

The site has never been conclusively dug by archaeologists. Scholars know by heart the handful of significant written references to it. It is easier to list what is not known about Lalibela than what is. It is not known precisely when the churches were carved, whether they were started during the thirteenth-century reign of King Lalibela or much earlier. Nor is it known where all the excavated rock was deposited, nor if any outside expertise was responsible. Nor why, deep in the mountains of Lasta, the Herculean task of chipping out these eleven churches and their labyrinth of link trenches was undertaken. Like Ethiopia itself, it is a timeless place, veiled by layer upon layer of mythologies.

The town’s earlier name of Roha is linked perhaps to al-Ruha, Arabic for the holy city of Edessa which was lost to the Christians just before the reign of King Lalibela. Then again it was the heir of the holy city of Aksum, believed by Ethiopians (never shy in their myth-making) to be Zion itself. So Lalibela took on something of the aura of Aksum and Zion, and thereby of the holiest of all earthly places, Jerusalem. King Lalibela himself was taken on a dream-tour of Jerusalem by the Angel Gabriel and was able to replicate its sites. Pilgrims therefore needed to go no further than Lalibela to earn God’s favour.

The yearning for Jerusalem has haunted generations of Ethiopians—a yearning amplified by its extreme risks. Wild animals, pirates and Muslims have combined in the imagination of Ethiopian Christians to create an über-threat for all those daring to leave the mountains. In the eighteenth century Queen Mentuab wailed to James Bruce that, after thirty years on the throne, she would give up everything if only she ‘could be conveyed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after’. Jerusalem was where it all began for Ethiopian kingship, where the union of Solomon and Sheba took place and from where Menelik I acquired the Ark of the Covenant, dancing before it like King David.

So Lalibela became a Biblical Land in miniature. Here is Golgotha, Cana and Nazareth. Beneath Calvary is the Tomb of Adam. I had skirted the slopes of Mount Tabor, Mount Sinai, crossed the River Jordan and climbed the Mount of Olives. In the compound of Beta Maryam, I had bent to smell the single rosebush from the Garden of Eden. Beside the church of Beta Giorgis is a slope of un-dug rock which is Mount Ararat.

Lalibela carries with it a weighty cargo of symbolism—not a place for the literal-minded. It made me think of Robert Southey’s comment after once visiting William Blake: ‘Blake showed me a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem,’ he reported. ‘Jerusalem is in Oxford street!’

It was a lovely morning. A few high clouds drifted in a clear blue sky. I passed the fresh grave of Colonel Melaku, where a mound of stones covered his body. An olive-wood cross rose at one end, and on it was nailed a crude plaque: Colonel Melaku Fetem born 1935 EC died at 61. The wreath of marigolds and mimosa was already wilting in the heat.

I was on my way to see a bahtawi. A churchman in Addis had given me the name of Abba Gabre-Meskal. ‘He may be there or—’ the churchman dropped his voice—‘he may have already vanished.’

I was in luck. I found him up a dusty alley, sitting outside his own lean-to. He was stitching a patch into his qamis, his anchorite’s shawl, dyed yellow (the Ethiopian monks use for this yellow the native plant Carthamus tinctorius, or ‘bastard saffron’). I sat on a stool opposite him and, as I tried to read the wrinkles of his cheek, asked if he knew anything about the dead colonel.

‘Colonel Melaku? He was my neighbour. Very religious man. He came to Lalibela for his death. He was a Derg colonel.’

‘But the Derg were against the Church?’

‘The Derg were devils! Some of the top ones, they just kept it hidden—they prayed in private.’

Abba Gabre-Meskal was pleased by the thought, and a smile spread across his weathered face. The smile became a chuckle, and the chuckle became a cough—and the cough bent him in two. During the last rains, pneumonia had forced him down from the mossy cave where he had lived for ten years. I offered him water. He drank it in short sips. I didn’t want him vanishing on me.

He was a tall man. He had deep-set eyes and skin like oxhide. His expression swung between comic innocence and holy rage. He raised the yellow qamis to his face to examine his stitching.

‘You a Christian?’

‘Of sorts,’ I said.

‘Protestant?’

I nodded.

‘Luther, Luther!’ He was sewing with quick, even stitches, even though he could hardly see. ‘Tourist?’

‘Yes. I’m going to Aksum. On foot,’ I added, for effect.

He wasn’t impressed. ‘Tell me, have you ever heard of a place called Jerusalem?’

I told him I had lived for a time in a monastery in the Old City.

Leaning down to gnaw through the thread, he looked at me properly for the first time. He folded the qamis and put it to one side. He laid his hands together in his lap, drew a big breath and, for an hour or more, captured me with a long and beautiful story about his own attempt to reach Jerusalem.

Abba Gabre-Meskal had begun his career at a religious school in the Gondar region. One day a fellow student died. The memhir called everyone together and said: ‘One of our brothers has died suddenly. Something is not right.’

They agreed that it was a punishment from God. It made them uneasy because they did not know what they had done wrong, and they couldn’t tell what would happen next.

‘We must make a pilgrimage,’ the memhir said. ‘Someone must go to Jerusalem, without shoes.’

A senior monk was chosen as leader and two others appointed to go with him. Young Abba Gabre-Meskal was one of them. They took with them the Psalms of David, a Book of Hours and gourds for water.

‘We set off with our faith. We put our trust in the will of God.’

They had no shoes.

In Tigray they came to the palace of Ras Seyoum. At the gates were many people—the sick, the poor and the needy. But the pilgrims’ leader was a well-known monk and Ras Seyoum himself came down to see him.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘We are going on a pilgrimage. One of our brothers died.’

The ras asked the monks to say a prayer for him at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. He gave them thirteen silver Maria Teresa thalers. The monks went on their way. They reached the border to the Sudan, and on the other side, the soldiers arrested them.

‘You are spies!’ they said.

‘We are not spies,’ explained the monks. ‘We are pilgrims on our way to Jerusalem. Look, we have no shoes.’

But the soldiers put them in the prison. They stayed there for a month and then the monks heard the soldiers say: ‘Perhaps these men are not spies. They have no shoes.’

So the monks were released. They carried on through the desert. It was a very difficult time. They found only salty water and the ground was hard and stony. One day a stranger came up to them and said: ‘Why do you walk without shoes?’

‘We are pilgrims. We are going to Jerusalem.’

‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the distance. ‘There is a train. I can ask it to stop and then you can travel easily to your destination.’

They looked at the train. They saw the long line of carriages and the white trail of smoke above it. They saw its round spinning feet and they realised the man beside them was Satan, sent to tempt them.

‘Go away!’ they shouted, and he disappeared.

Sometimes they followed the Nile and sometimes they were in the desert. They reached the border to Egypt and on the other side of the border the soldiers arrested them.

‘You are spies,’ they said.

‘We are not. We are holy men. We have no shoes.’

The soldiers saw that it was true. But then one of the soldiers said: ’Be careful—they may be extreme believers!’

So the soldiers put them in prison for being extreme believers. They spent months in that Egyptian prison. Abba Gabre-Meskal said the prison wasn’t too bad. It reminded him of the monastery. He did not mind being locked up, the poor food, the crowding. What he did not like were the rats. In the end the Egyptians released them and they carried on. They came to a famous place. It was, said Abba Gabre-Meskal, a great piece of water between Egypt and Lebanon. They stood by the water and they realised they could not cross it. They were very sad, but thought: It is not the will of God that we reach Jerusalem.

‘Our leader said he would stay. He would wait to try and cross the water. But we decided to go home. It was the end of the journey.’

Abba Gabre-Meskal rose to his feet. He fetched a bowl of kolo, roasted corn.

‘There is one more interesting thing.’ He stood high above me, the sun behind his head and one finger pointing at the sky.

On the way home, he said, the two of them reached a place where they’d been warned there was a great variety of wild animals. They decided they must sleep in the trees. They tied themselves to the trees so that they wouldn’t fall out, and in the night the wild animals came. First, he said, were the ones with horns, although in fact some of the ones with horns did not have horns. He and the other novice could see them down below in the moonlight. Suddenly the ones with horns began a great battle with the ones who did not have horns. There was such a noise and such fighting that the two young monks became afraid. But all at once the animals left—as if a lion or a tiger had come to the area. In fact, a lion had come to the area and beneath the tree there were suddenly many lions. Then there were also tigers. They had to beat metal objects together to stop the animals climbing the tree. Then the lions and the tigers started to fight and there was a terrifying noise as they fought.

But then they too ran away. ‘That was when we began to hear another noise. It was the biggest noise you can hear in the forest. The lions and the tigers stopped fighting and they were afraid. They ran away.’

‘What was the noise?’

‘A great big one!’

‘An elephant?’

‘Bigger than an elephant. I don’t know its name. We did not see it. We only heard its noise. Like a, like a…thing.’ He failed to find anything worthy of comparison. ‘Everyone knows it. It is a hundred devils in one!’

For the rest of the night they prayed and they heard the noise of the big thing moving among the trees. But as it became light, the noise stopped. Merchants came with camels and they came down out of the tree and the merchants gave them food. The two of them went on their way.

In Tigray they wanted to see Ras Seyoum to tell him they could not reach Jerusalem. They wanted to give him back his thalers. But their leader was not with them and they were just ordinary churchmen and so they waited, standing at the gates for a long time. Then they gave the money to a guard.

‘We returned to Gojjam after many difficulties. But we also met good people on the way.’

‘So, did you reach Jerusalem later?’

‘I went to Addis Ababa. I became known there. Did you hear the name of Empress Menen?’

‘The wife of Haile Selassie?’

‘She said she wanted me to go. She was going to arrange it. “Abba, you must go to Jerusalem!” But she died.’

He let out a long sigh. ‘I went to see the emperor’s daughter, Tenagne Worq. She asked her father. He said to me, Abba, where is your file? Where is my file? I didn’t have a file! But by God’s will they found my file. His Majesty held the file and said, You can go.

‘So I did go to Jerusalem. I went to the Holy Sepulchre, I went to Deir es Sultan, to Addis Alem monastery. I went to Bethlehem. But I was not as strong then as now. If I had gone now, I would have studied great books—they have books in Jerusalem that are as big as doors! But I was young then. I was not prepared.’

Hiluf was on a bus from Aksum. He would be in Lalibela in a few days. I meanwhile was staying at the Jerusalem Guest House, trying to prepare for the coming walk. Information was still patchy. Even the mysteries of the rock-cut churches were easier to pin down. There’ll be plenty of food in the markets…no food in the markets…you will need one mule…three mules…a car…no idea…militia…very hot…very cold…very steep…no food…

I had a problem with Ethiopian food. When I first arrived in 1982, I loved its spicy sauces, its spongy injera bread. But then on the second journey I picked up a stomach infection of such virulence that for a decade or more I lost a day or two each month to it. I assumed the years had sorted it out; but a meal in an Addis restaurant a week earlier had proved me wrong.

So I went to Lalibela’s weekly market. I found shallots and garlic and chilli peppers. I found rice and pulses and tomatoes. I bought screwtop containers. I bought biscuits and sugar and a block of sawn-up salt from the Danakil desert. I lined all the food up in my room. I had the tinned fish from Addis, and the sachets of soup. I packed it all very diligently into a canvas bag. I spread out the maps from Ethiopia’s Mapping Agency. I sliced off the unnecessary parts—the desert to the east, the Takazze lowlands to the west. I taped the folds. I sliced the Maudes’ translation of Anna Karenina into three pocket-sized sections and taped the spine (I kept the five-thousand-rouble note I had used as a bookmark when I’d first read it, ten years earlier, in Lithuania).

With the help of the Jerusalem’s proprietor, I settled on two mules and two muleteers—by the name of Bisrat and Makonnen. Bisrat was gentle and subservient, Makonnen canny and wiry. The mules looked healthy enough. They would come with us as far as the town of Sekota.

The days slipped by. I jostled with pilgrims and travellers at the sacred sites. I tried to ignore the immensity of the backdrop mountains, the heat that clambered up through the hours of each morning, my own breathlessness. In the evening, I sat on the terrace outside my room and read. A breeze would come up from the south and a thousand eucalyptus leaves brush together with a long watery shhhh. I was filled with expectation. Each morning I lay in bed and watched daylight leak into the eastern sky. Each morning I heard a blast of the tirumba: ’Citizens of Lalibela—come out, come out! Come out for the burial…come out, come out!‘

One evening I returned to the guest house and there was Hiluf sitting on a wall. A small bag lay beside him, a water bottle and three tied-together batons of sugarcane. He had the thick-lashed eyes and easy smile of the Tigrayans. He jumped down and we embraced. I liked him at once.

In my room, I showed him the neatly-packed bag of supplies. At once he set about repacking it, with the reverence for food of those who have lived with real hunger. We looked at the maps. I ran my fingers up across the dense contours of Wag and Lasta, into Tigray, Tembien and Gheralta.

‘Do you know any of this?’

He shook his head.

I glanced at his feet. ‘Hiluf, your shoes!’

He bent down and poked his finger through the sole. ‘It’s all right—they are quite good shoes.’

He looked up at me. He began to laugh, and I couldn’t help laughing with him.

‘We’ll have to get you new ones.’

Hiluf bent down and took a needle and thread from his bag.

In the morning Bisrat and Makonnen were at the gate. They held a mule each. The sun was a pale glow behind Mount Eshetan. We loaded the mules and set off. It was a feast day at Beta Giorgis. I let the others go on and went down to join the ring of worshippers on the edge of the pit. Another crowd filled the shadowy space below. The fat cruciform block of the

church rose high above their heads. The debtara were dancing. The beat of a kebbero sounded from among them.

The sun reached me with a warning flash in the corner of my eye; in a few hours it would be hot. I turned to leave and wound up through the gathering crowds. I stopped a woman with a flat-pan basket on her head and bought six bananas. They were stumpy and very sweet. The woman had a burn-mark covering one cheek. ‘Pay me what you like,’ she said.

As I caught up with the others, there was a distant cry: ‘Citizens of Lalibela! Come out! Help bury Girma Gabre-Selassie! Citizens of Lalibela, come out, come out!‘