I began to be terribly, horribly afraid that one day Papà wouldn’t come back to Amba Kwala and I would be alone with the strange, ruthless pilots of La Disperata coming and going from their poisoning missions. I had to get away before my father was lost.
I knew what White Raven would do. I realised I was going to have to pilfer a plane.
This is where my flight log begins again.
Here I am alone on Delia’s Dream. I planned my flight here on purpose, knowing it would be a good place to split the journey. Here I am, alone in the Simien Mountains with the bearded vultures circling overhead. The strangest thing has just happened. I landed here all by myself. (That is not the strange thing, though it is a beautiful thing. I landed here MYSELF, safely. Oh, the sweet song of the wind in the wires, when you know it’s right! Now it is getting dark. I will have to stay here tonight. It’s the first time I have soloed. This was my first flight all by myself and I’m still alive and I’m not lost. But that isn’t the strange thing.)
You know what I keep thinking? I am so mad at Delia. I am so mad at Delia I want to cry. Mustard gas! Fire in the thatched roofs, bombs exploding in people’s gardens, dead goats and shepherd boys. Mustard gas! Delia sent us here because she wanted to live in a place where black kids didn’t get lynched. Oh God. I am so mad at Delia.
And at Momma, for falling for Delia’s dream.
And at me, for believing any of it could be true. And yet the strange thing happened. It really happened. I am holding it here in my other hand, while I’m writing.
The wind was straight down the ridge, the opposite of where it was blowing the first time we came here, which is actually better because the ridge is a little wider where you touch down coming from the opposite direction and I didn’t nearly blunder over the cliff this time. I didn’t hit any of those danged bearded vultures either. I parked right in the middle of the tableland in case the wind changes overnight. I got out and sat down on the grass next to the lower wing, feeling very happy and grateful to be back on earth.
So I was sitting here, happy, and I patted the ground next to me to say hello to it. Tafash, ground, you’ve been lost. Selam.
Peace, peace, peace.
My fingers touched a smooth, round, familiar shape. I picked it up. Round like an eye, a clear glass disc set in a brass ring, a sky-blue arrow like an eyelash in the rose. I held the compass in my palm. I thought it must have fallen out of my blouse pocket when I climbed out of the plane. I’d put it there because the slacks I am wearing are much too big for me and I was worried it would get lost.
So now I dropped it back in my blouse. There was a click.
It was such a little sound. Such a tiny noise – that is the strange thing, that such a tiny noise, with no danger attached to it, could have made my heart leap into my throat the way it did.
I knew what I’d heard. I knew what the sound meant. It was the sound of the compass I’d just picked up hitting against the compass that was already in my pocket.
I was almost afraid to look. I sat frozen for a moment, feeling my heart beating against the two compasses.
Finally I fished them both out.
They are exactly the same: identical, round glass compasses the size of a button. They are the compasses Papà Menotti gave me and Teo for Christmas a year ago.
I have picked up Teo’s compass. In all the wilderness of Ethiopia, I have come to the pinpoint place where Teo left his compass.
A dozen wild explanations zoomed through my head: he dropped it when we first landed here? That couldn’t be: he had it with him in Addis Ababa when we went flying with Billy Cooper. Then I must have picked it up at the nameless landing place in the Takazze Valley, or back in Aksum – right? Is there any other way to explain it?
The only other way to explain it –
He picked it up and put it in his own breast pocket when he walked away from the coffee ceremony in Aksum. I remember him doing it. It was the last thing I saw him do. His dark brown fingers, slender like Delia’s, closing around the glass and golden brass, the quick, careless way he dropped it in his shirt pocket, just like I did a second ago.
The only possible way to explain it is that he landed here.
And took off again safely.
Flight Log Entry
Date: Mar. 2, ’36 (Yekatit 23, 1928)
Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1
Number of Machine: 15-22
Airfield: Amba Kwala to uncharted mountaintop, somewhere between Aksum and Lalibela
N 12˚ 58’ 10”, E 30˚ 50’ 29” (Delia’s Dream)
Duration of Flight: 1 hr 35 min
Character of Flight: Still alive
Pilot: Em (ME)
Remarks:
I guess this won’t count as real flight time or a real solo since the plane is stolen.
It is the fortieth anniversary of the victory at Adwa. Forty years to the day since we pushed the Italians out of Ethiopia. The only African nation never to have been colonised.
OH – I can’t think about it. I am going to write until it gets dark because otherwise I will have to think about everything. I will have to be here in the dark, looking up at the deep, starry sky, and worry about the wheel chocks holding while I get the engine started tomorrow, and where Momma is, and Teo, and where he went next after he lost his compass here . . . although of course he’d still be able to find his way, because there’s a compass on the dashboard of our own Romeo Ro.1. There is one on the dashboard of this one that’s mine now, this Romeo Ro.1 with its black-and-silver skull and crossed tibias, as Gianluca Adessi says, standing out against the yellow grassland camouflage paint.
I keep thinking about how upset Papà will be. How he made me that little Christmas tree with an acacia branch and decorated it with brass bolts hung on threads so that they twinkled as they turned, with loops of copper wire to make shining garlands around the twigs. He fixed beeswax candles in the twigs and lit them all. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d make. I keep thinking of how pretty it looked, twinkling in the shadow of the canvas awning when we crawled out of the tent on Christmas morning. And how pleased and anxious he looked, waiting for my reaction, and when he held out his arms I hopped into them.
‘Oh, Papà! Grazie, grazie! Bella, bella!’
I guess I didn’t say ‘beautiful’ the right way, but he knew what I meant. For the hundred most important seconds of our lives together, we totally understood each other.
It isn’t just from Delia that I get my taste for pretty, sparkly things.
And then he gave me this tie clip – the little pearl tie clip that he always wears, the one that Momma gave him when they were married. Because he hadn’t realised I was going to be with him on Christmas Day, and it was the first Christmas we’ve been together since maybe ever (I can’t remember another one), and he had nothing else pretty to give me. And I tried not to take it. And then I realised that I had to take it – that it would hurt him more if I didn’t. And now he hasn’t got Momma and he hasn’t got me and he hasn’t even got the stupid, pretty little tie clip.
STOP, White Raven. Just stop thinking until the stars come out. Write about the flight.
How did I do it? I don’t know how I did it. I mean – I do know how. I just can’t believe that I did.
Now that I know I can steal a plane from the Italian Air Force, I’m brave enough to do almost anything.
I got the idea of how to do it by thinking about White Raven. Not Momma, I mean, not Rhoda Menotti the wing walker, not the crazy flying woman trying to raise her American kids in Ethiopia. I mean White Raven the adventure hero in our stories. What would she do if she wanted to steal a plane?
She’d disguise herself as a Regia Aeronautica pilot, of course.
(I imagined myself making a false moustache out of a centipede or something, squinching it between my upper lip and my nose to hold it in place.)
I wanted a Romeo. I didn’t want one of the zippy new Fiat fighters – I wanted something I knew how to fly, and I
only know how to fly a Romeo Ro.1.
They don’t take them out as often as they take the others. When they do, it’s usually just one of them going along with a group of bombers and fighters. The Romeos have cameras mounted in the back instead of guns, so I guess they go along to take pictures or notes or count the troops or something. They only have two cockpits (ours with three is not normal), but sometimes only one pilot goes alone with no observer. I know all this because I have been watching and watching and watching.
At three o’clock in the afternoon today, three Italian pilots walked out to the parked Romeos lined up on the edge of the amba. I walked along with them. The hardest part of the plan, though not the scariest, was keeping my White Raven disguise secret until I needed to use it, then putting it on at the last minute. I thought I’d only get one chance. This was it.
There was one fellow on the amba who spoke a little English, who is friendly with Papà Menotti and helped us talk sometimes, and I pestered and vamped him into giving me his flying jacket, crossed tibias and all (and he has done a lot of pestering me because I do not wear it). Captain Adessi, that stinkbug, turned up on Christmas Day and gave me a white silk aviator’s scarf, useful for wiping dead bugs off your goggles. Little does he know he contributed to my escape plan. I pilfered one of Papà Menotti’s maps. I have a pilfered pair of sunglasses so that I too can look like a Disperata bug. I have my own water bottle and my own goggles and my own flight bag.
The hardest thing was to cover up my legs. They all wear flight suits and I am in a skirt. And barefoot. I pilfered Papà’s socks and a pair of his trousers this afternoon – the trousers are held up with string. All planned ahead of time. All thrown on in about two minutes when I saw the pilots heading to the Romeos.
When two of the three Italian airmen climbed into the Romeo at the end of the row this afternoon, and the other man climbed into the plane next to it, as they sat there, waiting to get their engines started, I climbed into the third plane in the line and waited to see what would happen.
I think I didn’t really expect anything to happen. I’m not sure I would have done it if I really believed it would. But it did – the guy swung the propeller of the plane I was sitting in, and the engine started.
I was completely camouflaged with my goggles on, invisible – more Black Dove than White Raven, for sure. The fact that I knew what to do with the plane – feet on the brakes, waiting for them to move the wheel chocks out of the way, set the engine idling at the right speed – meant no one realised that I wasn’t just part of the line-up.
No one knows I can fly.
When the other two Romeos began to taxi across the amba, I just followed like a baby goat following its mama – no hurry. I left the same amount of space between me and the second plane as he left between himself and the first.
The thing is, it’s easy taking off.
In the air, I left a great big gap between me and the other two planes. I followed them at a distance for a little while – only for a few minutes, because I figured they knew what they were supposed to be doing and they didn’t expect me to tag along. Then I turned south. I’d planned my route ages ago. That was the easiest part of my escape.
I guess it wasn’t just convenience that made me land here on Delia’s Dream, though it is about halfway to Tazma Meda. I always meant to come this way. I thought about it while I was flying – this is the sky Delia wanted to see. This is the sky Momma sees when she’s flying alone with her memories of Delia and Delia’s dream of an open African sky.
I am mad at Mussolini, and at the French who won’t stand up to him, and at the British who won’t let anyone arm us, and at President Roosevelt who is too wishy-washy to send the help he knows we need. I am mad at the slave owners who are so important Haile Selassie won’t risk offending them. I am mad at Delia and Momma for falling for the dream. I am so mad at everybody else for ruining it.
From Teo’s flight log. There is no date, but he wrote this before he left Aksum. I think this is safest in your own hands, Your Majesty.
I wish I knew some better cuss words. ‘Gosh darn it’ does not feel strong enough. Or I wish I knew how to pray properly. I am sure I’ve sat through 150 Friends’ meetings and never said a single prayer. All the beautiful church services in Tazma Meda are in ancient Ethiopian Ge’ez, the church language, and not even Ezra and Sinidu can understand it. I love listening, I love being there. I wrote all that stuff for Miss Shore about how it makes me believe in God to be there. But how do you learn to pray?
I am supposed to be FLIGHT PLANNING. I asked all the Aksum guards and priests to go away and leave me here to do it myself. And it is true they were giving me a headache and – well, I’m scared. I would rather make up the adventure story than have to do it in real life.
I don’t actually have to do any flight planning – just reverse the headings and change the wind direction. Emmy was right. I did all the hard work back at home, myself, under Momma’s watchful eye. The maps and calculations are all ready to go, and I’ll check them before we take off. I am so lucky that I can use them. I will be careful. Because these guys – these crazy people I am supposed to be helping – they think we’re going to be able to follow some goat path for three hundred miles. They don’t know anything about flight or air navigation. It’s up to me to get it right.
I have spent the whole day being scared – from the time Momma was doing aerobatics in the Takazze Valley and we thought she might kill herself on purpose, to being hunted and shot at by the Italian fighter planes, to being threatened with a rifle up against my head, to being led away into this shack with the guards standing outside.
When I first came in, I couldn’t see anything for a moment because there was such a contrast between the bright daylight and the shadowy inside of the hut. There were two big lumps of darkness in the gloom. One turned out to be a table and one was the box-shaped thing they’d been carrying on a litter made of sticks across the airfield when we landed, like a small case wrapped in gauze and strapped with leather cords. Pacing between them, fiercely covering the ground there and back one or two steps at a time, was a boy my own age, dressed like a priest. He glittered faintly when he walked.
When I came in he threw his arm up against his eyes to block out the brightness of the light in the doorway, but he didn’t stop pacing until they closed the door behind me. Then we both stood still, facing each other, each of us blinded for a minute.
We let our eyes adjust to the gloom and he stared at my feet. I wondered if I was supposed to bow or something. I took a step forward with my hand out and he stepped back quickly, then checked himself and stood his ground. But he didn’t hold out his hand.
He was scared too.
Nothing makes you brave like knowing you’ve got the advantage of fear. At least I wasn’t scared of the plane.
I said in Amharic, ‘I am Teodros.’
He kept on gazing down somewhere around my knees. His hands were clenched in fists. I took a step toward the wrapped-up box and reached a hand toward it. ‘This is your cargo?’
He leaped in between me and the box, holding up his hands in protest. He gestured firmly in the air, blocking my way. Don’t touch, he said with his body, though he didn’t utter a word.
‘Do you speak Amharic?’ I asked.
He didn’t respond at all – just stood protecting his box and staring at my knees.
‘OK,’ I said in English, resorting to talking to myself for reassurance, but also kind of hoping that my voice would sound so calming and full of authority that it would reassure this kid and also, maybe by luck or magic, make him understand what I was saying.
How was I supposed to plan a route with someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me where he wanted to go?
‘Teodros,’ I said again, pointing to myself. I could see all right by now. The light comes in through the chinks between the sticks that the walls are made of. I moved slowly and purposefully, hoping I wasn’t going to upset my passenger or make som
e stupid error to offend him. I unfolded the chart with the route from Takazze drawn all over it and spread it over the table. I patted the map.
‘Please tell me you know where you’re going,’ I said without hope, pointing to the page to tell him to come and look.
He crossed over to the table. He moved slowly and purposefully, as though we were both getting ready to fight a duel.
‘We’re here,’ I said, pointing to Aksum.
He didn’t touch the map. He looked at it with fearful interest, but I could tell he didn’t know what he was looking at.
It doesn’t look like a landscape – if you’ve never seen a map, how can you know what you’re looking at? Habte Sadek figured it out so easily when we tried to cheer him up with Momma’s maps during the Big Rains.
There is always another way of making a map, he’d said.
I chewed my lip and scratched the base of my skull, trying to be a genius. What did this guy actually know? Had he ever been out of Aksum in his life? Probably not. Habte Sadek had modelled landscapes with his hands because he’d travelled through them. But this young priest had most likely never seen anything but Ethiopian ecclesiastic books and church paintings.
‘Look, this is Aksum!’
I grabbed a china pencil and drew the giant stone monuments of the Necropolis on the map, in the gap where the hills meet. I drew the pool above the city at Mai Shum. I sketched in the church of Mary of Zion.
I drew a little square for Aksum’s airfield, with a tiny Romeo, and me standing next to it. I made it all look like a church painting – bold, curved, simple lines, like a cartoon, myself with a round face and a stubby, robed body, standing stiffly by the plane like I owned it, like it was my mule. I put a tiny flying helmet on me.
The boy priest leaned over the map next to me, watching, quizzical, figuring it out.
‘Aksum,’ he said quietly, in recognition.