The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance

The Chains of Heaven

PHILIP MARSDEN

AN ETHIOPIAN ROMANCE

For my parents,with love and gratitude

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

A Short History of Ethiopia

1

2

3

4

5

The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon

6

7

8

The Story of Tekla Haymanot’s Leg

9

10

11

The Lesson of the Ant-Lion

12

13

14

15

The Ethiopian Book of the Dead

16

17

Emperor Menelik Learns to Drive

18

19

20

21

22

The Crown of King Kaleb

Epilogue

GLOSSARY

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Short History of Ethiopia

Aksumawi was the son of Ethiopis and the great-grandson of Noah. He established the kingdom of Aksum which is itself the ancestor of modern Ethiopia. Unfortunately a snake took power in Aksum and ruled for four hundred years. The snake was 170 cubits in length, had teeth a whole cubit long, and the people of Aksum had constantly to supply it with milk and virgins. One day a stranger came and slaughtered the snake. The stranger was called Angabo and he in turn became ruler of Aksum.

Angabo married the Queen of Sheba, and after he died she left the city of Aksum with 797 camels to visit Solomon in Jerusalem. There, with Solomonic guile, he seduced her. Back in Aksum she gave birth to a boy named Menelik, and when he came of age he journeyed to Jerusalem to see his father. When he left Jerusalem he had the Ark of the Covenant. With the Ark the blessing of the Lord was transferred from Jerusalem to Aksum, from the people of Israel to the people of Ethiopia. Menelik was the first of Ethiopia’s line of Solomonic rulers.

The land around Aksum was very fertile and it came to be known among the world’s peoples as a place of wondrous plenty. Every rock on its open plains was a loaf of bread. Once for eight days showers of gold and pearls and silver fell on its hills and filled the rivers with riches. Palaces and temples swelled the bounds of the city. The graves of its kings were marked by standing stones and with each passing king the stones grew higher until they scraped the underside of the sky.

In 1974, Ethiopia was still ruled by the 225th member of the Solomonic line. Emperor Haile Selassie was then an old man. On the morning of 12 September, Ethiopian New Year, some junior officers of the Derg came to his palace, read out a deposition order and took him away in the back of a Volkswagen.

Derg means ‘committee’ in Amharic. It was established as a small concession to the armed forces and ended up taking over the whole country. With the emperor gone, the Derg ruled from his palace. In the cellar below the throne room, they imprisoned about 150 men. They were members of the emperor’s family, his generals, his government ministers and senior clerics. They were kept there for eight years. When the Derg met in the throne room, the prisoners below could look up from their dungeon and through gaps in the floorboards see the feet of the new rulers pacing back and forth.

1

When I was twenty-one, I went to Ethiopia for the first time. I had never been outside Europe, had never in fact been any further south or east than the top of Italy. Ethiopia amazed me. It shocked me, revolted me, awed and terrified me. It reawakened in me the childlike sense that the world was a vast, diverse and wonderful place—a sense that has remained ever since.

It was the early 1980s, and it was the rainy season. Billows of cloud half-covered the Entoto hills. From the airport the road entered Revolution Square beneath a triumphal arch which read, in English and Amharic: LONG LIVE PROLETAR-IAN INTERNATIONALISM! Marx, Lenin and Engels gazed out from a giant hoarding beside it, and I crossed beneath them. In a small Soviet-style block beyond the square, I reached the rain-streaked, plate-glass front of Wonderland Tours.

The door squeaked open on a darkened office. Sun-faded tourist posters were taped to the wall. A man in a goatskin chair stirred from his sleep, leapt up, gripped my hand in both of his, and grinned—as if the sight of a stranger in Wonderland Tours was itself a great joke.

Teklu was a Tigrayan. I had never come across anyone quite like him. He was no older than me but had the advantage of not having just spent his adolescence in a petulant daze. From the age of fourteen he had fought for the Tigrayan rebels. He had lived in caves, conducted night assaults, sprung ambushes. He had been captured, tortured and escaped. He then walked to Addis where another Tigrayan, Dr Mengesha, gave him a job and anonymity. Dr Mengesha owned Wonderland Tours. He was also an enthusiast, a lovely, grinning man in a dark suit who came jogging down the stairs from his office to greet me. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Congratulations for coming to Ethiopia!’ He sent me off with Teklu to find a hotel.

That afternoon in a flophouse near Giorgis cathedral Teklu and I lay on the twin beds and, while rain fell like gravel on the corrugated iron roof, I let him conjure up another country. He spoke of rock-cut churches among fairytale peaks, monasteries accessible only by rope or chain, treasures hidden in caves of gold and holy men who would vanish even as you talked to them. He spoke of his native Tigray and his own local town of Aksum where miracles happened every day and a caste of mute monks guarded the true Ark of the Covenant.

‘If you try and get close,’ he laughed, ‘they kill you!’

‘Can we go to Tigray?’ I asked.

He politely shook his head.

The few expats in Addis were less forgiving: ‘You’re a damned idiot, boy—you come here expecting a nice little holiday. This country is a living hell!’

Over the coming days, it became obvious even to me. Addis Ababa was paralysed with fear. Not all the figures lying on the edge of the road were sleeping. The Red Terror, when thousands of counter-revolutionaries were shot, was over—but the disappearances and killings continued. Rumours of patrols swept through the shanty like the afternoon rains sending everyone scurrying for shelter. And over it all presided the man who gazed down from the wall of every office—Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam.

For days, Teklu and I did the rounds of ministries trying to get permission to travel. We met only the mumbles and head-shakes of frightened officials. After a week, I decided to cut my losses and return home. I went back to Wonderland Tours. Dr Mengesha was there. He heard out my story and saw my frustration.

‘Ethiopia is a wonderful country, you know.’

I shrugged. I was in no mood to agree.

He tapped a pencil on his desk and said, ‘Come back this afternoon at four.’

I still don’t know what he did, nor why he chose to stick his neck out for a useless and ignorant farenj. But later that day he handed me an envelope and again said: ‘Congratulations!’ In it were all the right papers with all the right stamps. He spread out a map and explained our route. He took Teklu and me to the store and handed us a tent, a stove—and lifejackets. He was sending us to Lake Tana. Teklu grinned at me and winked. In that cowed city, Mengesha and Teklu seemed the only people who were truly alive.

So we did go north. We spent days on the lake, walking its bouldery shores, paddling from island to island on papyrus rafts, visiting monasteries. We watched the islanders spear catfish in the shallows. We asked when the last foreigners were there and they said: ‘Never.’ We almost drowned when a sudden storm caught us on the lake. ‘It is a beautiful adventure!’ Teklu was a man whose enjoyment grew in proportion to the level of danger.

Teklu and I exchanged letters for months afterwards. ‘Dr Mengesha says hello and do not forget us.’ How could I? Ethiopia had gripped me by the shoulders and shaken me awake. ‘Not too many tourists these days,’ Teklu wrote, without irony. He told me he had taken some Soviet bigwigs down the Omo river. A hippo overturned their boat. ‘We had a beautiful adventure!’ Then the letters stopped.

At the time few people were going to Ethiopia and I was able to indulge the illusion that I was something of an expert. I wrote about it, lectured about it, bored anyone who cared to listen. Ethiopia was my country. It was the central column of a shaky structure—life in my early and mid-twenties.

I went back a few years later. It was the rainy season again; torrents of water sluiced down Africa Avenue and into Revolution Square. LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM! was still there, as was the triumvirate of beards. I found myself again outside Wonderland Tours.

This time the plate-glass was daubed with swirls of white paint; traces of the name could just be read on the signboard. A paper seal covered the door and the jamb, with a purple ministry stamp. Wonderland Tours had gone. No one could tell me what had happened to Dr Mengesha or to Teklu.

After another three years I returned. I travelled in the south and east. I revisited Lake Tana and Gondar. But no armtwisting, no amount of lobbying could yield permission to see Lalibela or Aksum or Tigray, to reach the mountaintop monasteries of the north, the rebel heart of the old country. Nor was anyone forthcoming about Dr Mengesha and Teklu. The country was still in Colonel Mengistu’s grip, and I developed a perverse obsession with him. I listened to the whispered atrocities of war in Tigray and Eritrea, of the meetings when Mengistu himself would shoot his failing generals. I sought out dissidents, heard hinted fantasies of coup and assassination. But it was wishful thinking. I left Ethiopia sickened by its cruelty and torpor, convinced that Mengistu and the Derg would be in power for a generation or more.

For ten years I travelled. I roamed the Middle East and the regions of the old Soviet bloc. I never spent more than a few months in the same place. I found myself drawn to remote and restive minorities, to the passionate fringes of religious belief. I am convinced now that if I had not chosen Ethiopia, if I had not met Teklu, if Dr Mengesha had not procured the papers that afternoon in 1982, I would not have lived the life I have, would not have travelled quite so obsessively, and would never have begun to write.

All writing careers begin with a single sentence. Mine was: Teklu was a Tigrayan. (Actually it was Telku waS a Tigtayam, but a little Tipp-Ex remedied that.) I read it aloud—Teklu was a Tigrayan… It had a natural rhythm. It had alliteration, a declarative simplicity. I pictured prizes, heard plaudits, projected the entire range of human experience flowing through my fingertips. It was a long time before I wrote another sentence. When after five years the sentence was finally published, Mengistu was still in power and it read, for Teklu’s safety: Yared was a Tigrayan. The book that contained it was not a great success.

One spring I was in Armenia. Snow shone on the peaks of Zangezur, walnut trees were bursting into life and Grad missiles were falling on the town of Goris. The first of the post-Soviet wars was beginning—just as another was ending in the Horn of Africa. Mengistu’s military machine had been propped up for years by the Soviet Union, but now his brand of hard-line Leninism was out of fashion. The removal of Moscow’s support tipped the balance in the rebels’ favour. In that crumbling southern corner of the Soviet Union I crouched in the doorways of makeshift shelters listening to their progress on a short-wave radio. The TPLF and its allies were fighting along the shores of Lake Tana, at Bahir Dar. They were marching on Addis Ababa. Their tanks were entering Revolution Square. Then they were firing on the Ghibbi, the palace where the Derg was making a final stand. Mengistu had fled.

Twelve years passed. I was involved in other places, pursuing other ideas. But Ethiopia was where it all began—and it was unfinished business. At the age of forty-two, I went back.

The arch had gone. Above the entrance to Revolution Square there was no more LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM! The hoarding of Marx, Lenin and Engels had been replaced by one which warned of the dangers of HIV/Aids. Stencilled on the plate-glass front of Wonderland Tours was the silhouette of a woman’s head and: LUCY UNI-SEX HAIR SALON. The door opened on a late-afternoon hubbub of coiffurerie. The air was steamy with hair-washing. Along one wall ran a line of space-helmet driers; two or three white-coated women were giving manicures. But yes, this was the place—there was the mezzanine where Dr Mengesha had had his office; and that was where his wife Almaz sat doing the accounts. The back room had been the equipment store, where Mengesha had handed Teklu and me the equipment for Lake Tana. Now it was the Gentleman Salon.

‘Sir, please. Haircut?’ a man in a barber’s coat asked.

‘Thank you, I’m just looking.’

Under the stairs, in half-darkness, was the cashier’s desk. A woman was sitting there. I could see her now more clearly. It was Almaz.

My heart was racing. ‘You won’t remember me, but I came here twenty-one years ago—when it was Wonderland Tours.’

She smiled. She didn’t have a clue who I was.

But we went through to the Gentleman Salon and sat on a two-seater sofa. Almaz was wearing a sky-blue jacket. She placed her long fingers against her cheek. Before she married Mengesha she’d been an air hostess; it had been her face that had gazed out from posters of Ethiopian Airlines. The years had done little to her beauty.

I asked about Dr Mengesha.

‘Mengesha? They came one night and took him.’

‘Did they give a reason?’

‘They did not need a reason.’ Her voice was detached, distant. ‘Just “against the revolution”—that was all they needed to say.’

A man brought us tea on a stainless steel tray.

Slowly Almaz sipped from her cup, then replaced it in the saucer. She eased into speaking. ‘After Mengesha was taken, our son became very agitated. His school said to me, He is daydreaming, he cannot concentrate. So I thought if we could just see his father, it would be better. I went to the kebelle. I told them, Please, let me see my husband, you must let me see my husband…’

Her voice drifted off. She looked out through the open door.

‘Did they let you?’

‘We went to see him.’

‘How was he?’

‘The same old Mengesha! Joking and laughing. He was telling me, Don’t worry, Almaz, they are going to let me out very soon! He was so optimistic, always optimistic.

‘After that my son was better. But I was still worrying. I was imagining all the time, what will happen to Mengesha? And I was becoming very afraid for my son. Most mothers are pleased when they see their sons growing. But I just thought, they will take him to the army or to prison. In the end, I had to send him away. I said he was my servant’s son. They allowed him to go to the United States. It was many years before I saw him again.’

‘What about Mengesha?’

‘They moved him to another prison outside Addis. It took a long time before I could find out where it was. I used to go there with food—but I was not allowed to see him.’

A fat man in a suit came in, followed by the barber. The man took off his jacket and hung it on the coat rack. Braces swelled over his bell-shaped belly. The barber flicked open the folds of a towel and tied it around the man’s neck. He leaned back in the chair and fell asleep.

‘Then someone told me he was dead. But someone else said no, he was alive. I couldn’t imagine Mengesha dead so I convinced myself he was coming back. When the house needed redecorating, I did it in the colours he liked. He loved his books, and I took each one of them and cleaned them. After the Derg went, they opened up the prisons. I waited at home for him to come.’

We could hear the scrape of the razor on the man’s cheek. He was still sleeping.

‘One day on television there was a list of names. They said they had found papers saying Dr Mengesha Gabre-Hiwot had been killed in prison. That was how I discovered, like that.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘He loved this country. He was so proud of Ethiopia. He just wanted people to see it—“wonderland”, that’s what he thought it was.’

Reminiscence had made her fluent. ‘When I think of Mengesha now, I think of him always as an optimist. It made me afraid sometimes. It didn’t matter under the emperor. But in the Derg time, well, it was dangerous. I told him, It’s changed now, Mengesha, you cannot do that, not now. He just said, You must not worry, Almaz! He was always such an open man, so generous…

‘You know, before we were married, and he was away in Europe or America, he would telephone me every day. I would tell him it was expensive—he should not telephone. All right, Almaz, he laughed—and then the next day he would telephone me again. That was how he was.’

‘I know. What he did for me—it changed my life.’

We stood. We made our way to the front of the shop. As we

said goodbye, she cocked her head. ‘I remember you now—you went on a bus, didn’t you?’

‘That’s right. To Lake Tana.’

‘Of course. No foreigners went on buses. I said to Mengesha, This is not safe. There will be trouble. He just told me not to worry!’

‘What about Teklu, Almaz?’

‘Teklu?’

‘Teklu Abraham.’

‘He escaped to Kenya,’ she said. ‘Walking.’

‘Is he still there?’

‘No, no. He went to America—I hear he has a liquor store in Denver, Colorado.’

2

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.’