Desta-1-Chapter-One
January 1956
Abraham sits on a cowhide spread on the lawn in front of his home, situated at the foot of a tall mountain. Its shadow, presently just below his property, chases what remains of the daylight in this isolated and remote Ethiopian countryside.
Inside his folded and crossed legs, his fingers caress the soft brown hair of the hide as he dreamily watches the bright golden light move across the river and up the flanks of the eastern mountains. The evening is cool but comfortable. The valley hums with the lowing of home-bound cattle, the chirp of birds, the guttural call of colobus mon- keys in the nearby forest, and the chant of crickets in the bushes.
Ordinarily, Abraham would simply enjoy the cacophony of sound and activity sur- rounding him. This evening is different. His mind is taken by the rite of passage he will hold for his son, Desta, who turns seven in a couple of days. He will be inaugu- rated as a shepherd and assume all the responsibilities of a man.
The very thought of this ancient practice, however, ushers in memories of Abra- ham’s own ceremony that never happened, and the dark circumstances that disallowed its occurrence. For a moment, he is unable to see, feel, or hear anything. His fingers halt their play, his breathing slows, and his mind journeys to a place and time in child- hood. He feels as though he is digging through forty years of his life—youthful years, marriages, parenthood, and war—to find only the shattered images and incomplete stories of his childhood.
THE EVENTS THAT SHAPED Abraham’s life began on January 5, 1916, four days before his seventh birthday, in Kuakura, a place fifty miles north of here. On that eve- ning, Abraham stood in the front courtyard waiting for his father, Beshaw Mekonnen, to return from Dangila, where he reportedly had gone to buy his son a birthday gift.
It was then that he noticed the sky above the western horizon awash in blood— poured, it appeared to him, from the setting sun. Where the sky met the earth, Abra- ham observed a larger-than-life man lying down on his back, mouth agape, knees bent, and hands raised as if shielding his horror-stricken face. On either side of this giant figure stood two grotesque men of similar size. Frightened, they watched the sun descend into the man’s cavernous mouth. Lingering on the sight, Abraham ultimately determined that the blood that bathed the sky had flowed from the man who had swal- lowed the sun.
The celestial orb soon vanished, leaving behind a crescent amber afterglow on the horizon. Two vultures rose from their perch on the bow of the lone sycamore tree below his home and flew west. Abraham wondered if they intended to feast on the dead man’s body, the sun a palate cleanser capping the meal.
Past the sycamore tree and a row of thornbushes, the Kilty River flowed silently beneath a horse-mane of verdant grass that grew along its banks. Beyond the river, cattle and sheep herders drove their animals homeward across the vast fields, as the locals scurried along footpaths before darkness fell. All were oblivious to the crime committed moments before beneath the western horizon.
To Abraham, the scene was like a dream. After the evening haze had cleared, and just before the filmy light faded from the mountaintop, he realized that his eyes had deceived him. The vanquished man on the horizon had been the profile of the moun- tain peaks. The hands and bent knees were just trees on the ridges, the two standing men but hanging dark clouds. Nonetheless, the imagery left an indelible mark on Abraham’s consciousness. As he turned to go inside, he was mystified: Why hadn’t his father returned with his gift?
Having given up waiting for the father’s return, the family of five sat down for their dinner. It was at that moment, the too-familiar but unexpected call of an owl from the sycamore sent shivers down the mother’s spine. “She died, so she got buried,” the bird hooted repeatedly in its plaintive, human-like tone.
But there is nobody sick in the family the mother thought, knowing that the doomsayer usually makes that awful call when someone is about to die. To the children, the owl’s call was amusing. They mimicked the bird and giggled right up until they fell asleep. The mother went out twice and threw stones at it, and Kooli, their dog, barked insistently, but the bird was unrelenting. Feeling powerless as an infant, the mother contracted a sickening sensation in her stomach.
The father didn’t come home on the second or the third day, which was the fam- ily’s Coptic Christmas. In those two days, the mother was too preoccupied with her husband’s absence to do anything. Her hands moved mechanically, touching objects without feeling them. She ate her meals without tasting the flavor or smelling the aroma of the food. She walked through the house and outside into the grounds without feeling floor or ground beneath her feet. Her eyes saw things yet didn’t register them.
Her mind took her to places she had never been. Had her husband been tricked by a harlot and kept in her sway?
She reprimanded herself for her thoughts. Her husband was a God-fearing, Bible- reading man who wouldn’t allow himself to fall into debauchery. The perverted idea came after she had ruled out more conventional possibilities: sickness, robbers, delays to help relatives in town. And then there was that damnable premonition of the bird chanting ceaselessly in her ears. She spent much of Christmas day sitting misty-eyed on a bench in the courtyard, her three girls huddled around her. Abraham repeatedly ran to the gate to look for any sign of his father walking the twisted path to their home. The family’s world had cracked but they couldn’t know who or what had broken it.
By the fourth day, news had spread through word of mouth about the missing father and people came out in great numbers. Some were sent to search in Dangila; others combed the woods, fields, rivers, and creeks nearby, but their searches turned up nothing.
On the morning of the fifth day, which was Abraham’s seventh birthday, his mother was determined not to allow the misfortune that had befallen her family to interfere with her son’s celebration and rite of passage. On this important day, she also wanted to bestow upon Abraham the family’s ancient coin of magic and for- tune, as his father had intended.
She prepared food and drinks for the family of five. Then she retrieved the ancient sandalwood box that housed the coin. When she opened the box, she discovered the coin that had been handed down through several hundred generations, the family’s sym- bol of pride and identity, their emblem of fortune and prosperity—was gone! Her hands shook and terror gripped her brown face and eyes. She gasped, trying to cry out with stricken voice, but no sound came. Abraham and the three girls watched their mother in stark horror. Her hands still clutching the ancient box, she staggered and came crashing down on her husband’s bench in the living room. One hand anchoring her on the edge of the bench, the other now cradling the box on her lap, she gazed at the fireplace and shook her head slowly, trying to fathom the mystery dealt to her family.
Several minutes later she recovered. Together with the children, they ransacked the house, but the coin was nowhere to be found.
The family now felt as if their world were shattering in a million pieces. The mother knew that her husband had always kept the precious relic in its box. It became clear to her that their missing coin was a poignant clue to her missing husband. Whoever had stolen it might have harmed the father. And it was not difficult to guess the culprits: her neighbors—those two, good-for-nothing, green-eyed brothers who had known that the family’s wealth was linked to the coin.
The mother couldn’t go forward with her son’s birthday ceremonies. There was no gift, and now there was no coin. The shock of the lost treasure blotted out their appetites. To Abraham, the missing coin and uncelebrated birthday were the apex of
the long and painful wait and his mounting anxiety over the father who hadn’t returned with a gift. He felt abandoned, unloved, and robbed of the excitement that he had looked forward to.
Noticing her son’s distraught face, the mother was compelled to say something to ease his grief. “Only God knows what became of your father and the coin, son,” she said, holding Abraham by the hand. “For now, all we can do is pray for his safe return. As soon as he comes home, we’ll celebrate your birthday and hold your coming-of-age ceremony.”
Abraham was too disappointed to adequately register his mother’s consoling words. He broke free from her hold and went outside, wishing to deal with his problems on his own.
In the following days and weeks, relatives and friends searched for the father but found nothing, not a murder weapon, body, skeleton, or witness. A theory took form: the father had been given medicine by the evil brothers that caused him to go mad and abandon his family. That was a consolation to the grieving family, because it meant that he could still be alive.
For Abraham, time had stopped. No longer did he stroll the springy, green Abo Guendri fields with his father on sunny afternoons, his dog Kooli trailing behind them. He no longer sat next to his father and listened as he read the Bible, or watched him paint trees, animals, and people. No longer could he look forward to his father’s homecoming with stories of the people he had met and the places he had visited. He would no more have someone to call Baba.
Abraham would never accompany his mother, as he had been promised after he turned seven, to watch his father compete in the horse races at the yearly Bat’ha Mariam Church festival. There were so many ways he would miss his father. Abraham felt a deep void in his heart. To fill it, he vowed to avenge his missing father and coin once he got old enough to afford a gun.
The mother, afraid more misfortune could befall them if they stayed, decided to abandon her estate and move to the valley where her beloved cousins, Adamu and Kindé, lived near her younger brother and an uncle. She thought that the mountains would wall off her past, and that she and her children would be with relatives who would protect them.
To this end, they walked the fifty miles, driving their animals and carrying their possessions on their backs and heads. And it was during this journey, when they rested under the seamless shadow of the gottem tree that the mother gathered the children around her and said, “You promise me that as long as I am alive, you will never share with strangers we meet in the new place what has happened to your father.” She looked into the eyes of each child and waited until each answered with a verbal oath of “Yes, Mama.” Only Abraham had to be cajoled and begged before he complied with his mother’s request.
They settled in the hills of Avinevra, east of the Davola River, on a property owned by their relatives and in a valley the locals simply referred to as Gedel—The Hole. This was 250 miles northwest of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
FOR ALL OF HIS LIFE, Abraham had been haunted by memories of his father and the ancient, precious family coin. These incidents molded Abraham as a man, husband, parent, and even a warrior.
After this mental journey to his childhood, Abraham looked up to discover that the sunlight had vanished, and the valley was now draped in charcoal-gray dusk.