The soldier thanked Sinidu with a nod of his head. It got so still in the other room that even the baby’s coughs seemed quiet.
‘Now play!’ Sinidu commanded. ‘Tell your news or every single ear on the other side of the door will fall off!’
The soldier stole a brief glance at her and Sinidu’s expression changed. Something about him made her serious for once. She listened.
‘The police in Gondar attacked the Italian Consulate there. An Italian Consulate guard and three Ethiopian policemen were killed – and what will it achieve except to enrage that grasping Fascist Mussolini, who will use it as an excuse to send in more guards! I was a guest there, an envoy from the emperor. Which side should I have defended? And with the stand-off in the south, the Italians will not let the visiting Ethiopian soldiers drink at a well that is theirs by right –’
He paused, glancing up up to see if any of us knew what he was talking about, and bit his lip. We do know who Mussolini is, the prime minister of Italy who calls himself Il Duce, the leader. He has made Italy one of the Great Powers, along with France and Britain and Germany. Momma doesn’t like his politics, but she doesn’t say much about him because of Papà Menotti.
‘I am sorry,’ the soldier apologised. ‘I am in haste, and you don’t understand what I’m talking about . . . I thought there might be news. If there is none, then I will be the first to tell the emperor about the killing in Gondar. Thank you for the use of your radio. I can’t stay here. I’m going on to Addis Ababa to make a report. There is no other way to send word.’
Em said what I should probably have had the guts to tell him in the first place. ‘Our mother can take you.’
The poor man glanced at Sinidu. She hadn’t been introduced and she didn’t look old enough to be our mother, because she isn’t, but also now she is getting very big now because she is finally going to have a baby, so she was clearly somebody’s mother. And she is a tiny beautiful soap bubble of a person who was not likely to be carrying a soldier on her back in place of his horse, which is what Em sounded like she was offering.
The poor man struggled between anger and outright laughter. You could see it in his face. He didn’t want to stare at us and he didn’t want to ask embarrassing questions.
‘Our mother is a flyer,’ I explained. ‘She’s American and she keeps an aircraft here. She can fly you to Addis Ababa in about two hours.’
‘Ah!’ Understanding and amazement flooded his face. ‘A woman flyer?’
Emmy opened her mouth. ‘Why not? Sinidu is a woman flyer and she’s Ethiopian!’
‘Now you let me speak, Emilia,’ Sinidu said with grown-up authority all of a sudden. ‘There is a time and place for every battle and this is not your battle.’
She spoke directly to the soldier.
‘You can leave your horse at Beehive Hill Farm and come back for him later. The American children will lead you. Their mother is working now, but I will send her as soon as she finishes and she can go with you before it gets dark – Go ask her now, Em.’
Em nodded her head politely, always obedient when Sinidu got sharp with her. She slipped off to find Momma. We all knew the timing of the flight might be a problem if Momma was supposed to be assisting at a cataract operation or something like that.
The messenger soldier turned to me and said abruptly, ‘I have never heard an American accent before. But your Amharic is more fluent than the Italian consul’s. Were you born in America?’
I hesitated. Of course I was born in France. ‘I was in America until four years ago,’ I offered. It is so darn complicated trying to explain the past to anyone.
‘What made your flying mother bring you to Ethiopia?’
Because we didn’t expect a war?
Because she is an idealist? Because Ethiopia was Delia’s dream?
‘My father was Ethiopian,’ I told him.
He nodded like that made all the difference. Sinidu leaped in to explain exactly what Colonel Horatio Augustus had tried to point out on my first night in Addis Ababa.
‘Of course his mother brought him here. The law is that a child born of an Ethiopian father is an Ethiopian citizen.’
And here is a conversation where I can’t remember what language I was talking in, even though it happened yesterday, the day after the soldier came. I don’t think I dreamed it, but it was in the middle of the night, so if I was dreaming this is the language I would have spoken. Maybe a mixture of both.
‘Teo! Are you awake?’
‘Of course I am.’
It’s impossible to sleep in our house when Momma is away. We have got a proper round house – not a pretend English villa like the Sinclairs’ house or a modern building like the clinic – with walls of mud and sticks and a thatched roof, which some of the coffee cooperative people in the village helped build for Momma. We’ve got one room which is divided in three by curtains. When we first came to Tazma Meda, me and Em slept in the same bed and Momma slept by herself. But about two years ago Momma and I swapped so now we are divided into girls and boys (I mean boy) instead of kids and grown-ups (I mean grown-up). It is sometimes lonely for me and sometimes irritating for Momma, but everybody sleeps reasonably well. Except when lizards go prospecting in the thatch and scorpions jitterbug inside the walls and if you light a lamp you’re sure to attract aerobatic moths the size of bats.
‘I’m getting up,’ Em said. ‘Coming? I made popcorn.’ She does all our cooking which she learns from Sinidu, who worries that we are all going to starve from stupidity. Sinidu used to come up here to make us breakfast every morning; she’d beg and beg Momma to let her niece Hana run errands and cook for us, because anyone of any consequence has a kid working for them, but Momma just will not do it. She will not pay some other Tazma Meda kid to do work her own kids can do, and Hana is younger than Em. So now Sinidu comes up here every other morning to razz Em while Em does it. Em is the only one of us who’s interested in cooking, mainly because she’s always the hungriest.
Em lit the beeswax taper in the iron lantern and packed up her picnic. Then we took the lamp with us, and a stick in case we met a hyena. We walked the long way around to the airfield, leaving a trail of stinky beeswax smoke. We avoided going near the Sinclairs’ big house because their dogs get noisy if you go too close in the dark.
We stopped at the plane’s shed to pick up the empty fuel cans and the plank we use as a bench and carried them out to the middle of the airfield where we set up the bench. Em took off the thick gabi she’d wrapped herself up in – like a shamma but heavier – and spread it over and around the plank to make it comfortable and give us something to protect our feet from creepy-crawlies. We sat down, straddling the bench back to back, leaning against each other and looking up. In the dark it is impossible to tell how wide the airfield is, and the little beeswax light kind of made it worse, so we blew it out.
It was like being in a big black bowl. You couldn’t see a thing on the ground – not the shed we’d just passed, not a flicker of light from the Sinclairs’ house. Beehive Hill was a big black bump on the horizon. And above us were a hundred million stars.
Momma couldn’t come back till the sun rose at the earliest. It was pointless listening for the sound of the Romeo’s reliable engine. But it was comforting to sit on the airfield where she’d land.
‘Shooting star!’ Em cried out.
We’d both seen it. We banged our heads together as we both tilted them back at the same time to get a better view of the sky.
‘Doggone it –’ Em said (that was definitely in English). Then we saw another one, a blazing bloom of gold light brighter than the flame we’d put out in the beeswax lantern. It lasted for three seconds, drifted a little way across the sky and went out.
‘Like rocket ships!’ I said (also definitely in English).
‘You have to stop basing everything on those Buck Rogers comics Grandfather used to send. They’re meteors. It’s the Leonids!’
‘There’s an American who makes ro
ckets. Real ones. Robert Goddard. He’s got a beautiful big grant and help from Charles Lindbergh. I read about it in Popular Science, the one that had Momma’s photo. You know, of the walls around Harar, from a thousand feet up. Sometimes I really wish there was some way I could meet a man who makes rockets.’
‘You know why people make rockets?’ Em said. ‘Same reason they take photographs from the air. To invade other countries.’
‘That’s not why Momma takes photographs from the air, and it’s not why Goddard makes rockets. He does it ’cause he loves rockets.’
‘Maybe it’s not why he makes rockets. But it’s why people pay him to make rockets, and it’s why other people take photographs from the air.’
Boy, is Em ever cynical, in any language. I am not sure she understands how satisfying it is to make up anything, not just stories – to think of new ways to do things. But the soldier’s visit was making her worse.
Beehive Hill Farm was incredibly quiet. There wasn’t anything there but stars and meteors and trees in the distance, coffee trees and the juniper trees that shade them, and night-time bugs chirping somewhere not far from us. Em had one knee crossed over the other and both her legs were jittering, shaking the rickety bench. Her anxiety was contagious.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked quietly.
‘Rockets. People shooting each other. You heard him, the traveller. He said: “Small things are going to become bigger things.” And that other thing he mentioned, in the south. He told Momma about it while she was getting the plane ready to go. A troop of Ethiopian soldiers are asking for water at a well that’s controlled by an Italian fort, and the Italians won’t let them have any. In our own country! That’s bound to turn into a fight.’
‘What’s an Italian fort doing there in the first place?’
‘They built it five years ago. They have forts everywhere, all along the borders with their colonies, all over Eritrea and Somaliland. But this one isn’t on a border with an Italian colony! It’s inside Ethiopia, by some well in the desert that doesn’t mean anything except to a few cattle rustlers out there looking for water. It’s sixty miles from the border. The Italians shouldn’t be there.’
‘Well, the Gondar police shouldn’t be ganging up on a government office either.’
They all seemed such pointless, faraway squabbles that we normally wouldn’t care. But we’d met the grim messenger whose focused plan was to tell the emperor about the skirmish he’d witnessed, and our mother had flown away with him, and now we were alone with the meteors.
Em’s foot, kicking in the dark, drummed against the fuel can beneath the plank we were sitting on. The empty can let out a tinny, hollow echo of protest. And suddenly I realised what was nagging at us both – the uneasy thing that brought these faraway squabbles home to us, more than just meeting the tired soldier who had been a witness. It was the empty fuel can that made me think of it.
‘I know why you’re scared,’ I said. ‘Momma told him he didn’t need to pay her for the fuel. He tried to give her ten dollars’ worth of bullets, but she wouldn’t take them. Remember how mad she was that time we went camping without telling her, and she came looking for us in the plane? She doesn’t like wasting fuel. But she took the messenger to Addis Ababa without making him pay. She did it as a favour.’
‘So she’s scared too,’ said Em hollowly.
If Momma is worrying about the Italians invading Ethiopia and starting a war, she must be worrying about what that will mean for me and Emmy.
I can’t believe anyone would want to come to Tazma Meda to have a battle anyway. But I guess it might affect our fuel supply for the airplane, or the supplies for the clinic or something. Whatever it is, it’s enough to make Momma scared.
Maybe she is scared we will have to leave. That would scare her to death.
I don’t want to have to leave her. But I am not sure I want to stay here if I can’t go anywhere else – if we get trapped because people are fighting on the borders. I want to be able to do things. If Momma doesn’t teach me to fly some day, I am going to go crazy. And what is Em going to do in Tazma Meda five years from now when she is twenty-one? She can’t be a deacon up on Beehive Hill.
We didn’t go back to the house to sleep. When we got so tired we couldn’t sit up any more, we went and bedded down in the Romeo’s shed so that we’d be there first thing in the morning when Momma got back. The shed is bigger than our house, but not as solid, because the chinks between the sticks that make the walls are not filled in and the roof is corrugated iron instead of thatch. The iron sheets rattle in the slightest wind and the noise keeps you awake. I don’t know when I’ve ever been so relieved to hear the sound of the Romeo’s engine.
There still hasn’t been any news about Gondar on the radio, or about the soldiers who aren’t being allowed to use the well in the south, so maybe it really isn’t important. But Ethiopia is not like Pennsylvania, where there are radios in every house, and the operator listens in on every telephone call, and the mailman and the paper boy come every morning. Here there are no newspapers and no radios and no telephone. We pick up our mail in Addis Ababa every three or four months. We don’t get any mail in the rainy seasons because we can’t fly then.
The answer is, I don’t know if what happened at Gondar is important.
I don’t know what language I dream in either.
Theme by Em
Subject: ‘Ethiopian Culture’
Beehive Hill Farm, Tazma Meda
Jan. 20, 1935 (Tarr 12, 1927)
Momma is forcing me to write this. Bea Sinclair is now old enough to go to boarding school with her sisters, so the family have all gone to Addis Ababa to wave goodbye to her on the train and that awful pill Shore has gone with them so she can escort Bea back to England. Boy, is Bea going to hate having to wear shoes all the time. There’s no reason for Shore to come back here except us, so I guess we are done with her. That leaves us without an English-speaking teacher. Momma has been acting a little desperate lately about our lack of what she calls ‘real schooling’ – I think she knows how much Teo minds not being able to stuff his head full of other people’s ideas to chew over, and the progressive village school finishes with everybody when they are twelve – so now Momma is going to make us keep up the theme writing to get us to think about other things besides The Adventures. Miss Shore left us a boatload of her blue paper theme books. I guess I don’t mind writing – I love writing – but I don’t know if I want Momma to read all of it. I bet she won’t anyway. She’s not patient enough to read two whole theme books full of pencil scrawl and fix the punctuation.
I blame Sinidu – her double-crossing good intentions turned Momma into a schoolmarm. They are both worrying about what Teo and I will end up doing if Italy invades Ethiopia.
Sinidu started on Momma the day after the soldier came to the clinic to use the radio. ‘Teach them to fly. Make sure they can write and figure in English. Make them listen to the radio every day.’
Sinidu is a pretty good teacher herself, what with the Amharic and the cooking, and anything she does counts as ‘Ethiopian Culture’, doesn’t it? So I’m just going to pick up writing about Sinidu where Teo left off his last theme for Miss Shore.
As soon as the sun came up the morning after our stargazing, Teo and I were out on the landing strip, watching for Momma to get back from her trip to Addis Ababa. We had to wait more than an hour, but she must have left before sunrise, just as it was starting to get light, to make such a speedy journey. We jumped up when we heard the familiar buzz of the Romeo’s engine. Each of us grabbed an end of the white gabi blanket, and we stood there, waving it between us like a flag to welcome her. Momma waved the white end of her own shamma from the front cockpit as she taxied past us, the way she always greets us. Then she taxied up as close as she could get to the plane’s shed and switched off the engine. The wheels were still rolling so we pushed her in.
She hopped out lightly and hugged us both and kissed us on top of our heads.<
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‘Oh boy, I thought those Frenchies who do the Imperial Air Force training at that new Akaki airfield weren’t ever going to let me leave!’ she said cheerfully. ‘Trying to get me drunk on tej –’ (but Momma would never drink honey wine when she’s flying, because alcohol was illegal the whole time she flew in the USA) ‘– and gossiping about the good old days back in France before they came here. One of them trained with my instructor at the same airfield where I learned to fly! Think they’d do just about anything for a lady flyer. Look.’
She hauled a five-pound sack of coffee out of the rear cockpit. Teo and I burst out laughing. Momma laughed too.
‘I know, I told them I live on a coffee farm, but this is from Harar and Harar coffee is absolutely the yummiest in the world. Listen, kids, I’m beat – I’m going to take a quick nap before I head to the clinic. Why don’t you take some of this coffee down to Sinidu?’
But Sinidu was already in our house when we got there, waiting for us, with fatira breakfast cakes frying and coffee beans roasting.
‘Beautiful!’ Momma exclaimed, and they kissed each other’s cheeks, and Sinidu whooped at the five-pound bag of coffee.
‘I am not carrying that! I have enough to carry!’ She patted her beautiful big baby bump. ‘If I thought I had to carry that back to the village I would make you drink it all up this morning!’
‘The kids will carry it for you! Where do you want it?’
‘I am not going to drink all that coffee with a baby in my belly! We will take it up Beehive Hill to Kristos Samra for my uncle and my nephew,’ Sinidu said. ‘Coffee guzzlers!’
Only a woman can make coffee, so Habte Sadek and Sinidu’s nephew Yosef only get to drink it when me or Sinidu or her niece Hana makes it for them.
Sinidu turned back to squat by the frying breakfast and added, ‘Also my uncle will want to know about the Italian Consulate in Gondar. So, play! Tell me the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force news, because you know it will be a better present than coffee. I like flying machine gossip, and I will tell Habte Sadek.’