I felt a mule kick in my hand before I heard the shot.
Then the gun came sliding free in my hand, as if it had never been wedged there but had simply been sitting on his belly b.u.t.ton.
I smelled burned clothing and cordite. I saw a red pit in his belly. I saw life slip out of his eyes as easily as a dew drop rolls off a rose petal.
I felt his pulse. It was a variety Ghosh had never shown me: the absent pulse.
ROSINA SENT GENET to fetch Gebrew.
He came running. He hadn"t heard the shot. The bungalow was far enough removed and the gun so m.u.f.fled by the man"s belly that the sound had not carried.
"Hurry. Someone might come for him," Rosina said. "But first we must move the motorcycle." With all five of us heaving, we righted the BMW and managed to get it to the toolshed, just past the curve at the bottom of our driveway. Other than a ding on the tank, the bike looked no worse for wear. In the toolshed we rearranged the cords of firewood, the stacks of Bibles, the sawhorse, incubator, and other junk kept there, so that the bike was hidden from sight.
Returning to the body, we had little to say to one another. Gebrew and Shiva fetched the wheelbarrow, and with Rosina and Genet"s help, they fed the body into its rusty cavity. I leaned against a tree, looking on. He lay in the wheelbarrow in the kind of unnatural posture only the dead achieve. Now with Rosina leading us, we pushed him through the trees on the perimeter trail, just inside of Missing"s wall, until we reached the Drowning Soil. The hospital"s old septic tank was located here, deep underground, and for years it had overflowed before it was taken out of use. USAID concrete, Rockefeller funds, and a Greek contractor named Achilles had built a new one. But the old tank"s effluent had digested the land. A downy growth of moss served to deceive the eye; anything heavier than a pebble would sink. The odor, present at all times, kept trespa.s.sers away. Matron had barbed wire strung around it, and the sign in Amharic said DROWNING SOIL, which was the closest translation for "quicksand."
The smell was powerful. Pushing down the fence post so that the barbed wire was flat on the ground, Rosina and Gebrew got the wheelbarrow as far forward as they dared. I glared at Shiva. He was impasive, looking on. He could have been watching shoeshine boys at work-it was the opposite of what I felt. They were about to pitch the body forward when I said, "No!" I grabbed Rosina"s hand, forcing her to set the wheelbarrow down. I was shaking, crying. "We can"t do this. It is wrong. Rosina ... Oh my G.o.d, what have I done-"
Rosina slapped me hard. Shiva put his hand on my shoulder, more to restrain me perhaps than to offer support. Rosina and Gebrew took the handles again, and they tipped the dead man out.
The mossy ground sagged like a mattress. The face on that body no longer belonged to the man who had terrorized us; it was a pathetic face, a human face, not that of a monster.
When the body finally disappeared, Rosina spat in its direction. She turned to me, the anger and bloodl.u.s.t contorting her face. "What"s wrong with you? Don"t you know he would have killed us all for the fun of it? The only reason he didn"t is he was even hungrier to steal Zemui"s motorcycle. Don"t feel anything but pride for what you did."
WE WALKED BACK in silence. When we were home, inside the kitchen, Rosina turned to us, her hands on her hips. "No one but us knows what happened," she said. "No one can know. Not Hema. Not Ghosh. Not Matron. No one at all. Shiva, you understand? Genet? Gebrew?"
She turned to me. "And you? Marion?"
I looked at my nanny, her face bloodied and the missing tooth making her look like a stranger. I steeled myself for more harsh words from her. Instead, she came over and held me in her arms. It was the hug a woman gives either her son or her hero. I held her tight. Her breath was hot in my ear as she said, "You are so brave." This was my consolation: all was well between me and Rosina. Genet came over and put her arms around me.
If this was what brave felt like-numb, dumb, with eyes that could see no farther than my b.l.o.o.d.y fingers, and a heart that raced and pined for the girl who hugged me-then I suppose I was brave.
CHAPTER 27.
Answering Medicine
HANGING SEEMED TO BE THE FATE of anyone who"d been close to General Mebratu. What spared Ghosh thus far was that he was a citizen of India. That and the prayers of his family and his legions of friends. His imprisonment did more than suspend everything in my world; it took away any meaning life once had for me.
It was then, as we despaired, that I thought of Thomas Stone. Before the coup, Id go for months without thinking of him. Having no picture of him, and no knowledge that he had auth.o.r.ed a famous textbook (Hema, I learned later, had given away or removed every extant copy of A Short Practice at Missing), Thomas Stone seemed unreal to me, a ghost, an idea. It didn"t seem possible that I might have been fathered by someone as white-skinned as Matron. An Indian mother was easier to imagine.
But now, as time stood still, this man whose face I couldn"t picture was on my mind. I was his son. This was my moment of greatest need. When the army man came to steal the motorcycle and could have killed us, where was Stone? When I murdered the intruder-that was still how I saw it-where was Stone? When that death mask loomed in front of my eyelids at night, or when cold hands clutched at me from the shadows, where was Stone? Above all, when I needed to free the only father I ever had, where was Stone?
In those awful days which soon stretched out to two weeks, as we went back and forth from house to jail, to Indian Emba.s.sy, to Foreign Ministry, I was convinced that had I been a better son to Ghosh, if I"d been worthy of him, I might have spared him his present torture.
Perhaps it wasn"t too late.
I could change. But what form should this change take?
I waited for a sign.
It came on a bl.u.s.tery morning when word of fresh hangings in the Merkato reached us. I set out hurriedly for the gate for no particular reason: wherever I was, I was ready to be somewhere else. On my way there, a mysterious sweet, fruity odor reached my nostrils. Simultaneously, a green Citron, floating on its shocks, its back tires hidden by skirtlike fenders, wheezed into the portico of Casualty. A portly man slumped in the backseat was carried out by two younger men, and at once the scent got stronger. He had the cafe-au-lait skin and jowly features of the royal family, as if hed been raised on clotted cream and scones in place of injera and wot. To me he looked asleep. His breathing was deep, loud, and sighing, like an overworked locomotive. With every exhalation he gave off that sweet emanation-it even had a color: red.
I knew I"d encountered this odor before. Where? How? I stood thinking outside Casualty as they carried him in, trying to solve this puzzle. I realized I was engaged in the kind of reflection, the kind of study of the world, which I so admired in Ghosh. I remembered how he"d conducted that experiment with blind man"s buff-literally a blinded experiment-to validate my ability to find Genet by her scent.
Later Dr. Bach.e.l.li told me the man had diabetic coma-the fruity odor was characteristic. I went to Ghosh"s office-his old bungalow- and read from his textbooks about the ketones that built up in the blood and caused that scent. Which led me to read about insulin. Then about the pancreas, diabetes ... One thing led to another. It was perhaps the only time in the two weeks since Ghosh had gone to prison that I"d been able to think of anything else. I expected Ghosh"s big books to be unreadable. But I found that the bricks and mortar of medicine (unlike, say, engineering) were words. You needed only words strung together to describe a structure, to explain how it worked, and to explain what went wrong. The words were unfamiliar, but I could look them up in the medi cal dictionary, write them down for future use.
Hardly two days later, I encountered the scent again at Missing"s gate. This time an old woman stretched out on the bench of a gharry, propped there by her relatives, was the source. She had the same sighing, breathing, and not even the horse"s strong scent could conceal the fruity odor. "Diabetic acidosis," I said to Adam, and he said it was possible. The blood and urine tests confirmed that I was right.
Somehow, life went on at Missing. Whether we had one doctor or four, the patients kept coming. The simple things-treating dehydration in infants, treating fevers, conducting normal deliveries-were routinely managed. But anything surgical had to be turned away I hung around Casualty with Adam, or else I hid in Ghosh"s old bungalow browsing through his textbooks. Time didn"t speed up, nor did my fear for Ghosh diminish one bit, but at last I felt I had found something that was the equivalent of Shiva"s drawing or his dancing, a pa.s.sion that would keep disturbing thoughts at bay. What I was doing felt more serious than Shiva"s pursuits; mine felt like an ancient alchemy that could cause the prison gates in Kerchele to spring open.
During that awful period with Ghosh in jail, Almaz holding vigil outside prison, and the Emperor so distrustful of everyone that Lulu had to sniff every morsel of His Majesty"s food, my olfactory brain, the feral intelligence, came awake. It had always known odors, the variety of them, but now it was finding labels for the things it registered. The musty ammoniacal reek of liver failure came with yellow eyes and in the rainy season; the freshly baked bread scent of typhoid fever was year-round and then the eyes were anxious, porcelain white. The sewer breath of lung abscess, the grapelike odor of a Pseudomonas-infected burn, the stale urine scent of kidney failure, the old beer smell of scrofula-the list was huge.
One night after supper, Matron dozed on the sofa while Shiva drew intently at the dining table. Hema, who was pacing the room, stopped by my armchair. This was Ghosh"s spot. I had my feet up and books piled next to me. I think she understood that I was preserving his s.p.a.ce. Over my shoulder she saw the thick gynecology textbook of hers that I"d opened, purely by chance, to a picture of a woman"s v.u.l.v.a distorted by a giant Bartholin"s cyst. I made no attempt to hide what I was doing. I sensed Hema struggle to find an appropriate response. She put her hand on my hair and then the hand slipped down to my ear, and I thought she was going to twist my pinna (that"s what I learned the fleshy part of the ear was called). I felt her indecision. She caressed my pinna and stroked my shoulder.
When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don"t bare your heart, do make a.s.sumptions about the motives of others. They"re certainly doing all these things to you.
I"m sure Hema believed that a prurient interest in a woman"s anatomy took me to that page in the textbook. And perhaps it did, but that wasn"t all there was to it. Would she believe me if I said that those musty old books with their pen-and-ink drawings, their grainy photographs of people parts contorted and rendered grotesque by disease, held out a special promise? Kelly"s Obstetrics and Jeffcoate"s Gynecology, and French"s Index of Differential Diagnosis (at least in my childish way of thinking), were maps of Missing, guides to the territory into which we were born. Where but in such books, where but in medicine, might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained? Where else could I understand the urge in me (was it homicidal? Id lie awake at night wondering) that did away with the army man, and then the simultaneous urge to keep it concealed and to confess? Maybe there were answers in great literature. But I discovered in Ghosh"s absence, in the depths of my sorrow, that the answer, allanswers, the explanation for good and evil, lay in medicine. I believed that. I was sure that only if I believed would Ghosh be freed.
ON THE THIRD WEEK of Ghosh"s abduction, I walked to the front gate in the morning, just as St. Gabriel"s sounded the hour, which was Gebrew"s command to allow entrance. The narrow pedestrian opening permitted just one person at a time to come through. What prevented chaos and a stampede was the sight of Gebrew in his priest"s garb.
Two men jostled each other, high stepping over the frame of the gate like hurdlers. "Behave yourselves, for G.o.d"s sake," Gebrew admonished. Next came a woman who stepped over gingerly, as if getting out of a boat and onto the dock. As the patients took turns to peck like hens around the four points of Gebrew"s handheld cross-once for the crucified Christ, then for Mary, then once for all the archangels and the saints, and then for the four living creatures of the Book of Revelation-and waited for Gebrew to touch it to their forehead, order was imposed. These visitors to Missing feared illness and death, but their fear of d.a.m.nation was greater.
I studied the faces, each one an enigma, no two alike. I hoped that the next face would be Ghosh"s.
I imagined the day my "real" father-Thomas Stone-would step through the gate. I imagined myself standing here. I"d be a doctor by then, and I might be in my green scrubs, taking a break between surgeries, or in my white coat with a shirt and tie beneath. Even though I had no photograph or memory of Stone to go by, Id know it was him right away I knew what I"d say to him: You"re much too late. We went ahead with our lives without you.
CHAPTER 28.
The Good Doctor
IAWOKE WHILE IT WAS NOT YET DAYBREAK. I ran as fast as I could in the dark to the autoclave room. This was the thought that woke me up: What if Sister Mary Joseph Praise could intercede and free Ghosh? My "father" would never come, but what if my birth mother was just waiting to be asked? I hoped she wouldn"t hold my long absence from her desk chair against me.
Seated, staring up at that print of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, seeing only faint outlines as I hadn"t put on the light, I felt as if I were in a confessional, but with no desire to confess. I was silent for ten minutes or so.
"You know for the longest time I a.s.sumed that all babies came in twos," I said. I was making conversation. I didn"t want to get to Ghosh or the favor I sought right away. "Koochooloo"s pups came in fours and sixes. At Mulu Farm we saw a sow with twice that number.
"We are identical twins, but the truth is we aren"t exactly identical. No, not the way a one-birr note is identical with another birr note in all but the serial number. Shiva is actually my mirror image.
"I"m right-handed, and Shiva"s left-handed. The swirl on the back of my head is on my left. Shiva"s is on the right."
My hand went to my nose, again something I wasn"t telling her. A month before the coup, I had a confrontation with Walid, who"d been teasing me over my name (such an easy target). I found myself flattened by a head b.u.t.t-a testa-and the fight went out of me. Testa-Italian for "head"-some claim is an ancient Ethiopian martial art, but if so, there are no dojos, no belts, just lots of broken noses. The only defense against the "big knuckle" is to lower your head. Walid used his testa when I wasn"t expecting it.
To my surprise, Shiva helped me up. Shiva was so tuned to the distress of animals and pregnant women, yet he could be blissfully unaware of the pain of other humans, especially if he was the cause. I watched in astonishment as Shiva confronted Walid. Walid"s answer was another testa. Their frontal bones met with a sickening clash. When I could bear to look, I saw Shiva standing as if nothing had happened. The junior boys came running like vultures around carrion, because the fall of a bully makes big news. Walid was supine on the ground. He came to his feet and tried it again. The dull thud of their heads left me in mortal fear for Shiva. But Shiva hardly blinked while Walid was out cold with a big gash on his skull. When he eventually returned to school, he was a subdued figure.
That night Shiva allowed me to explore his head. Unlike me, he had a gentle peak at the vertex, and his frontal bones were very thick and as hard as steel. My topography was different. I had asked Ghosh why this might be, and he postulated that the instruments used on Shiva at birth might have caused the bones of his head to heal in this "exuberant" manner. Or else it might have had to do with the fact that we were conjoined. I was too proud to ask what exactly that meant.
A folio-size book in the British Council Library had pictures of Chang and Eng of Siam, the most famous Siamese twins. A few pages later was a portrait of the Indian Laloo, who toured the world as a circus freak. Laloo had a "parasitic twin emerging from his chest." Laloo stood in a loincloth, and from his bare chest sprouted two b.u.t.tocks and a pair of legs. To me it looked as if the parasitic twin wasn"t "emerging" from Laloo, but climbing back into him.
When I could unglue my eyes from the pictures, every word in that text was a revelation to me. I learned that when two embryos just happened to grow in the mother at the same time, the result was fraternal twins-they didn"t look alike and they could be boy and girl. But if a single embryo in a mother happened to split very early on in its growth into two separate halves, the result was identical twins like me and Shiva. Conjoined twins, then, were identical twins where the early split of the fertilized egg into two halves was incomplete, so the two halves remained stuck to each other. The result could be like Chang and Eng, two individuals connected at the belly or some other spot. It could also result in unequal parts, like Laloo and his parasitic twin.
"Did you know that Shiva and I were craniophagus? Connected at the head?" I said to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. "They cut that connection at birth-they had to. It was bleeding."
I was silent for a long while, and I hoped she understood that I was being respectful. It was selfish for me to talk about our births when they coincided with her death. We had another long and awkward silence.
"Can you please get Ghosh out of jail?"
There, I said it.
I waited for a reply. In the ensuing quiet, I felt guilt and shame wash over me. I hadn"t told her that Id ripped out the page on Laloo and left the library with it; Id said nothing about killing the army man and how I feared a terrible retribution some day.
There was something else Id held back, something I understood only after seeing the pictures of Chang and Eng, and of Laloo: the fleshy tube between Shiva and me had been cut and it was long gone ... but it wasn"t gone-it still connected us. That picture of Laloo captured how I felt, as if pieces of me were still stuck to Shiva and parts of him were inside me. I was connected to Shiva for better or worse. The tube was still there.
What would it have been like if ShivaMarion walked around with heads fused, or-imagine this-sharing one trunk with two necks? Would I have wanted to make my way-our way-through the world in that fashion? Or would I have wanted doctors to try and separate us at all costs?
But no one had given us that choice. Theyd separated us, sliced through the stalk that made us one. Who"s to say that Shiva"s being so different, his circ.u.mscribed, self-contained inner world that asked nothing of others, didn"t come from that separation, or that my restlessness, my sense of being incomplete, didn"t originate at that moment? And in the end, we were still one, bound to each other whether we liked it or not.
I left the autoclave room abruptly, without even a good-bye. How could I expect Sister to help me when I was holding back so much?
I didn"t deserve her intercession.
So I was astonished when, an hour later, it came.
It took the form of a cryptic note on a Russian hospital prescription pad. It came to Gebrew from Teshome, his counterpart at the Russian hospital gates. Teshome said it was from a Russian doctor who had made Teshome swear to keep his ident.i.ty a secret. On one side the doctor had scribbled: "Ghosh is fine. Absolutely no danger." On the back Ghosh had scrawled: "Boys, SCREW YOUR COURAGE TO THE STICKING PLACE! Thank Almaz and no need to wait. Matron please call in all favors. Hope lovely bride renews yearly contract. x.x.x G."
I went back to the autoclave room. I stood behind the chair like a penitent and I thanked Sister Mary Joseph Praise. I told her all. I held back nothing. I asked for her forgiveness-and for her to continue to help us free Ghosh.
I SAW ALMAZ ANEW, saw her quiet strength and determination in the nightly vigil she had held outside Kerchele Prison. Whatever she lacked in education she made up for in character and in loyalty.
But Id lost all respect for the Emperor. Even Almaz, always a staunch royalist, had a crisis of faith.
No one really believed that Ghosh was a party to the coup. The problem was-and it was the same for hundreds of others whod been rounded up-His Majesty Haile Sela.s.sie made all the decisions. His Majesty wouldn"t delegate and His Majesty felt no haste.
Every afternoon we went to Kerchele to deliver the one meal we were allowed to bring, and to pick up the container bearing the previous day"s meal. The relatives outside the prison were our family now. It was also the most fertile place to gather new information and plausible rumors. We heard that the Emperor took a morning walk in the palace garden, during which the Minister of Security, the Minister of State, and the Minister of the Pen came out to him one by one. They walked three paces behind him and reported on rumors and real events of the previous twenty-four hours. Each man worried whether the one who went before him had set a trap by mentioning something which he then failed to mention. Lulu, a royal diviner, peed on certain people"s shoes, and the rumor mills were undecided if that was an indication that you were to be trusted or you were under suspicion-this was the sort of thing one learned by visiting Kerchele.
The next day, just twenty-four hours after my visit to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, we were allowed to see Ghosh.
The prison yard with its lawn and giant shade trees looked like a picnic spot. Under that green canopy, the prisoners stood like leafless saplings.
I spotted Ghosh at once. Shiva and I flung ourselves into his arms. It didn"t register till we were in his embrace that his head had been shaved or that his face had become gaunt. What did register was that my chest stopped aching for the first time in over a month. The scent on his clothes, on his person, was a coa.r.s.e, communal odor that made me sad, because it spoke of his degradation. We stood aside to allow Hema and Matron to get near him, but I kept a hand on him, frightened that he might vanish. Some men are improved by losing weight, but Ghosh, without his plump cheeks and jowls, looked diminished.
Almaz stood back, her face all but hidden by the tail of her shama, waiting. Ghosh freed himself from Hema and Matron, and he walked over to her. She bowed deeply, then bent as if to touch his feet, but Ghosh grabbed her arms before she could, and he pulled her up and kissed her hands. He embraced her. He said hed been so happy to see her standing and waving when they would take him back and forth in the covered jeeps, even though he knew she didn"t see him. Almaz, whose teeth Id never noticed before, grinned from ear to ear, while tears ran down her face.
"The only suffering for me was worrying about all of you. You see, I didn"t know if they"d arrested Hema as well. Or maybe even Matron. When I saw Almaz standing in the prison yard, holding that picture of the family in her hands in that frame, I understood she was saying you were all right. Almaz, you put my heart at ease."
None of us knew till then that Almaz"s vigil had included the family picture, and that whenever a car came or left the prison, she"d stand up and hold that picture up and smile.
The minutes were ticking by and we pressed Ghosh to tell us all. I don"t think he wanted to alarm us, but he couldn"t lie. "The first night was the worst. I was put in that cage," he said, pointing to a grubby, low-slung shack that looked like a storeroom. "It"s a tiny s.p.a.ce. You can"t stand up. That"s where they put common criminals, murderers, along with vagrant boys, pickpockets. The air is terrible, and at night, they lock the door and then there"s no air at all. This one fellow, a brute, rules the place, and he decides who sleeps where. The only place where you can get a little air is by the door, and in return for my wrist.w.a.tch, he let me sleep there. If I spent another night there I thought I"d have died. No sheets, no blankets, sleeping on the cold ground. When the sun rose, I was scratching from lice.
"A major came directly from the palace with instructions to take me to the military hospital and give me everything I needed to care for General Mebratu. The Emperor didn"t have much faith in the doctors who were caring for him. When this major saw where I"d spent the night, and saw that my face was swollen, and that I was limping, he was furious. He took me to the military hospital where I could shower, get deloused, and get a fresh set of clothes.
"At the military hospital, they showed me the General"s X-rays, then took me to him. Who do I see there but Slava-Dr. Yaroslav from the Russian hospital. Slava was shaking badly and not looking good. As for Mebratu, he was in deep sleep, or else he was unconscious. Slava said the Ethiopian doctors wouldn"t go near the General. They were terrified that if he died they"d suffer, and if they saved him they"d be suspected of being sympathizers. "Slava," I said, "tell me he is sedated, and wasn"t this way before you saw him." Slava said the General had been wide awake, speaking, no weakness in hands and legs when he came in. "I was against sedation," Slava said. All this time, there was another Russian doctor with Slava, a youngish woman-Dr. Yekaterina. She said, "Sedation is very good. He has head injury. We have to operate." I said, "Head injuries are only important because the head contains the brain. That bullet is not near the brain." "What you call this," she says pointing to his eye. "Comrade," I said to her, "I call it his...o...b..t." She didn"t think much of me, and I didn"t like the way she was disrespectful of Slava. Slava may be an alcoholic, but he was a pioneer in orthopedics before they banished him to Ethiopia. Slava mouths to me from behind her, "KGB!" I called in the major. "What are your instructions as far as my authority?" He said, "Whatever you need. You are in charge. Those are my direct orders from His Majesty." "Good," I said. "Take this doctor back to Balcha Hospital. Don"t let her come back. I need medicinal brandy, some smelling salts, and let"s put two beds in this room for me and Slava." I dosed General Mebratu with every antibiotic there was, and gave Slava the brandy and he stopped shaking. Then Slava and I debrided the General"s eye, right at the bedside, cut away what was hanging without trying to do too much more. The General never stirred. I had no plans to take the bullet out.
"For the next two nights, I had Slava for company, and I slept in a regular bed. It was three days before that Communist sedation wore off. "Slava, was that dose of sedative for a horse, by any chance?" I asked. "No, but it was given by a nag named Yekaterina!" Slava said.
"When General Mebratu woke up, other than a slight headache and a nasal voice, he was in good shape. They wouldn"t let me stay there anymore, and they sent Slava off. That"s when I scribbled the note. When I came back here they put me in one of the proper cells with some decent chaps. They brought me back and forth once or twice a day, to dress the wound, but I wasn"t allowed more than a few words with the General."
I"d already spotted two giant rats emerging in broad daylight from a gutter between two buildings. Ghosh was hiding things from us, but then we were hiding something from him.
From that day on, we were allowed twice-weekly visits. Now the only question was when he would be released.
First one, then another of Ghosh"s VIP patients came by the house to pick up some comfort from home that Ghosh sought-a particular pen, more books, a paper in a certain stack. Theyd bring with them a Lati-nate script in Ghosh"s handwriting, a prescription for a compound mixture, and I"d lead them to Adam, the compounder.
In Ghosh"s absence I understood what kind of doctor he was. These royals, or ministers or diplomats, weren"t seriously ill, not to my eyes anyway. They didn"t have the power to get him out of jail, but they had the power to get into prison to see Ghosh. He, by pulling down the lower eyelid and looking at the color of the conjunctivae, by asking them to protrude the tongue, and all the while with his finger on the pulse, managed to diagnose and rea.s.sure them. The modern designation "family pract.i.tioner" doesn"t quite cover all the things he was.
THREE WEEKS AFTER we first saw Ghosh, General Mebratu was put on trial, a show for international observers. An underground newspaper carried reports of the trial, as did a few foreign papers. General Mebratu, proud and far from penitent, wouldn"t renounce what he"d done. His bearing made a great impression on people who were allowed to attend. From the witness box he preached his message: land reform, political reform, and the end of ent.i.tlements that reduced peasants to slaves. Those who had fought to put down Mebratu s coup now wondered why they had opposed him. We heard that a core of junior officers plotted to spring the General from prison, but Mebratu vetoed this. The death of his troops weighed on him. The court sentenced him to hang. His last words in the courtroom were "I go to tell others the seed we planted has taken root."
ON THE EVENING of the forty-ninth day of Ghosh"s captivity, a taxi drove up our driveway and swung around the back. I heard Almaz yell, and I tried to imagine what new calamity we were facing.
Getting out of the taxi, surveying our quarters as if he"d never seen them before, was our Ghosh. Gebrew, who"d ridden on the running board of the taxi from the gate, jumped off, clapping with glee, hopping in place. Genet and Rosina came out from their quarters. We danced around Ghosh. The air was filled with shrieks and with lululululu-the sound of Almaz"s joy. Koochooloo was there, barking, wagging her tail, and howling, the two nameless dogs standing at a distance following her cue.
It was midnight when we went to bed, Shiva and me crowded in with Ghosh and Hema. It was far from comfortable, and yet I never slept better. I woke once and heard the sound of Ghosh"s heavy snoring: it was the most rea.s.suring sound on earth.
WE AWOKE EARLY the next morning, our mood still celebratory. Unbeknownst to us, at that moment General Mebratu, veteran of Korea and the Congo, graduate of Sandhurst and Fort Leavenworth, was taken to his execution.
They hung him in a clearing in the Merkato, perhaps because it was in the Merkato that the student procession and the idea of the coup had found its most vocal support. The executioner, we later learned, was the Emperor"s aide-de-camp, a man General Mebratu had known for years. "If you ever loved a soldier, put that knot carefully," General Mebratu was reported to have said. When the noose was in position, and just as the truck was about to pull away, the General took a running jump off the back of the truck, sailing off into martyrdom.