Divinity Road (5 page)

And I? Even in those early days I had an interest in art and architecture, was in awe of the majesty of buildings, intrigued by the process that could turn four walls and a roof into something rich and powerful and glorious or, equally, ugly and inhospitable. So even then I would steal into the kitchen to sharpen my pencil with one of the chopping knives, pocket the scraps of rough paper used by the market women to wrap up vegetables and spices, brought home by Fatuma and then discarded. These I would recycle for my sketches, drawings modelled on photographs I had seen of the wonders of Islamic architecture, the mosques and palaces of Istanbul and Isfahan, Damascus and Cairo, Fès and Agadez. These juvenile masterpieces were displayed all over the house, stuck up on the whitewashed walls in every room, evidence of my perceived talent and the pride my parents felt for me.

So you see, my childhood was a time of happiness, of family love and parental care and support. By the time I was nineteen my early dreams of becoming an architect were made concrete by my remarkable school-leaving exam results. With a scholarship guaranteed, I was all set for a rosy future, my plans mapped out for me: a degree in architecture in Egypt, then a job in my Eritrean homeland or, more likely, Addis Ababa, one of the new generation of east African professionals set to lead the region from its colonial past to a bright new dawn of technical and cultural self-sufficiency.

A month later my father was dead, victim of a heart attack at the age of forty-five, and I was driving his taxi, my educational ambitions turned to dust.

I am being called for breakfast. It seems a good place to pause, marking as it does the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. That is, the period before I met you, my angel.

***

I am back in my cell, my stomach churning from the unfamiliar diet I am subjected to here: dry, cold toast, tasteless as cardboard, lumpy lukewarm porridge, soggy cornflakes. To protect my digestive system, I eat little and stick to the sweet milky tea.

So where was I? Oh yes, the catastrophe of my father’s death. By that time, my brother had a year to go at teacher training college, both sisters still at school, a considerable household with no income, so I made the obvious choice. After all, my father’s taxi was sitting outside the house. It was a straightforward decision. One day I was queuing for a student visa at the Egyptian Embassy, the next I was ferrying the great and the good of Asmara between the Medebar Market, the Great Mosque and the Governer’s Palace, hauling my compatriots to and from the airport or train station.

And I did not resent my state of affairs. As you well know, I was not, have never been particularly religious, more out of ignorance than considered thought. I left that to my elder brother. But I suppose I accepted my father’s death and my changed circumstances with a quiet fatalism. After all, I loved my family, and felt a filial obligation to protect my mother. I suppose that my golden mapped-out future was still an abstraction for me. You do not miss what you have never had.

So I became a taxi-driver, stepping into my father’s shoes, even inheriting some of his regular clients. At home, things changed gradually. My mother never really recovered from my father’s death, survived him by three cheerless years during which she rarely left the house, ate almost nothing, leaving the running of the household to Fatuma and my sisters. She finally succumbed to her broken heart half-way through the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, my brother finished his studies and got his first posting in a school just outside Mendefera. My elder sister got married, the younger one found a job as a secretary in the Ministry of Education.

Eventually I tired of treading water. I began to ask myself whether I wanted to live out the rest of my life in Asmara. I had a sudden urge to spread my wings. I reasoned that Addis Ababa, capital city, political powerhouse, headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity, could surely accommodate another hard-working taxi-driver. I could speak basic Amharic, the result of a friendship with the children of our Ethiopian next door neighbours. I had it all planned: I would drive by day, sending monthly contributions back to my unmarried sister who had taken over the running of the family home. Then in the evening I would enrol on some courses, revive my abandoned educational ambitions, starting with some kind of diploma in draughtsmanship, and work my way up gradually.

With this plan in mind, I packed up my belongings, loaded them into the back of the taxi and set off for Addis Ababa and, though I did but know it, for you, my flower.

Now I must stop. Kalil, my cellmate here, has promised to teach me some English and it is time for my daily lesson. I will leave you with another memory from childhood, an episode that came back to me recently. I am eight or nine and my father has given me a few coins as pocket money. It is late afternoon and I am hungry so I head for the neighbourhood street vendors, following the aroma of the sweet, deep-fried dough balls. I buy half a dozen from one of the women, clutching the package to my chest. Still some distance from the family home, I come across a group of street children, bare-footed and feral, and in an instant I am surrounded, pushed to the ground, relieved of my precious treasure. I still hear their triumphant laughter in my ears as I arrive back in the house, dusty and defeated.

The story is prised from me over supper. My brother is unsympathetic and calls me weak, telling me I should have fought for what was rightly mine. My mother offers a vague, slightly anxious smile. My father tells me that it is wrong to fight fire with fire, that you should fight fire with water. Repel evil with that which is best, he says, then adds,
Al Mu’minun
, the name of the Surah in the
Qur’an
from which he is quoting. He tells me that the boys that attacked me were living on the streets without help or support and that we should pity them. He says that if you treat people like animals for long enough, they will eventually start to behave as such, that it is not their fault. He points to the
Qur’an
in the glass cabinet and tells me to seek support within those pages, to let the gentle words soothe me. He takes it down, flicking through the pages to find what he is looking for, a particular Ayah that I came across recently in my reading, an instruction for a good Muslim to:

Spend of your substance, Out of love for Him For your kin For orphans For the needy For the wayfarer For those who ask

He was a man of peace, never harmed a soul, not even with words. Never laid a hand on any of his family. I have always tried to follow his ways, my dear, as you well know.

***

Well, that is my lesson for the day completed. It is not easy, I can tell you. Kalil himself admits that his English is rudimentary at best, and our only textbook is a bilingual version of the
Qur’an
that I received on arrival at this centre, a donation published in America. I fear that our linguistic instruction is at the mercy of the translator. Still, beggars cannot be choosers, and my father would be happy to learn of my religious piety.

Let us return, then, to Ethiopia, to my cramped room, my initially inept attempts at taxi-driving in an alien city, my gradual establishment of a new life away from my beloved but sleepy Asmara in this sprawling and confusing metropolis.

My first few months there I was all at sea. My taxi licence and first month’s rent ate up most of what savings I had taken with me. More often than not, I got lost while delivering my clients. Sometimes it would be the passenger who would direct me through the confusing labyrinths of Addis. But I persevered, frequently spending my free time in my vehicle, an old Peugeot 504, driving around the city, familiarising myself with each district and setting myself challenges to re-locate addresses I had previously been given and got lost finding, forcing myself to make these streets my own. I began to feel the layout of the city, the government and educational sector in the east, the commercial central sector, and the downmarket western sector with the Mercato, the central mosque and the industrial sites.

With the extra outlay in fuel, my monthly profits were pitiful, but my own needs were minimal and I still managed to send home a little each month end.

By the end of my sixth month I was beginning to feel more at home there. I was working long hours, a morning shift from six until noon, then back to my room for a bowl of shiro, that chickpea porridge we Eritreans are so fond of but which you, my darling, could never develop a taste for. After a couple of hours’ sleep, I would go back for a second shift until midnight. There was no question of attending night school at this stage, though I continued to read my architectural books, to sketch and dream. My Amharic was becoming more fluent, and that helped reduce my sense of alienation. I suppose in my quiet way I was content.

And then I met you. It started one morning at seven. You were outside the post office on Churchill Avenue near Adua Square trying to hail a taxi to your first lecture of the day at the University. As I was later to learn, you were in the final year of your teaching degree. I stopped to pick you up but did not really want to take you all the way to the campus as I was planning to head out to the airport, a much more lucrative proposition. But one look at your full lips, your slender neck, those laughing eyes and flashbulb smile and all thoughts of financial profit flew out of the cab window. I was hooked.

Of course nothing happened on that first journey. You barely registered my existence, answering my gently probing questions about your studies with a vague detachment. You said later you were worried about a test you were due to take that day, but I think in truth I simply made no impression on you. When, as you paid the fare and made to leave, I asked you what your name was, you hesitated, as if waking from a day-dream and realising for the first time that you were in someone else’s company, then shrugged and answered with a non-committal but not unfriendly smile. I felt fully alive for the first time since my arrival in Addis. I soon worked out your routine, planned my morning shift pattern around your pick-up, cursed if another taxi driver took your custom and worried if you did not show up. Our conversations deepened gradually and little by little I worked my way inside your consciousness until you, too, began to see me as more than just an object in your daily life. I remember the first time you asked me about my background and I told you about my aborted study plans and my passion for architecture.

For my part, I had already learned a lot from my casual questioning. I knew you were from a well-to-do Christian family, that you had ambitions to teach children, that you liked home grown jazz, devoured African history books, that you could speak some French and English.

My breakthrough came that first morning of the student strike, you remember. I had picked you up and we made small talk as we headed towards the campus. I could see something was up as we crossed Sidist Kilo Square and approached the southern gates of the Guenete Leul Palace. The roadblock was a new addition to the thoroughfare and the soldiers looked menacing, so I reversed and pulled up in front of the Yekatit 12 Hospital. Well, I said, looks like no school today. You smiled and shrugged. A holiday, you answered. Whatever am I going to do with myself? You raised your eyebrows and made a show of looking perplexed, but at that moment I knew you were deliberately offering me an opening, and by God I took my chance with both hands. Trying my best to remain outwardly casual, though failing miserably I am sure, I pretended to pause for thought. How about a sightseeing tour of your hometown? I suggested. I will show you the architectural wonders of the city. Another shrug from you. But no violent reaction, no outraged rejection. So I took that as a yes.

We started with Africa Hall, passed the Filwoha Springs and Giorgis Cathedral on Churchill Road, the Menelik Mausoleum, Trinity Cathedral, the Grand Palace. We took in the Tiglachin Monument, the Freedom Tower, the churches of Menbere Leul Kidus Markos and Meskia Hazunan Medhane Alem. We stopped outside the Entoto Mariam Church and the National Theatre, drove past Arat Kilo. At each building, I would describe what I was seeing, what made it special, what I would have done to improve it, how it made me feel.

And then it would be your turn, and you would fill in the history of each site. From you I learned that it was Queen Taytu’s love of the Filwoha Springs that persuaded her husband to establish Addis as his capital, that Giorgis Cathedral was built to commemorate the victory over the Italians at Adawa, that the Menelik Mausoleum housed the tombs of many of the Ethiopian emperors. That the National Museum accommodates Lucy, the three-and-a-half million year old female fossil so important in tracing human evolution. I learned the story of Zerai Deres’ martyrdom at the Lion of Judah Monument, of the massacres carried out by the Italian Vice-Roy Marshal Grazziani commemorated at Yekatit 12 Square. Finally, you pointed out which of the city’s squares were used to display the bodies of the Dergue’s victims during the Red Terror.

By twelve o’clock we were both tired and hungry and I suggested going to the Mercato for lunch. On our way to the market, we passed through Abune Petros Square with its imposing memorial and later, as we ate injera and wat at a cheap roadside café, you told me the story of the bishop it was named after, a martyr executed by the Italians in 1937.

When I finally pulled up outside your house, we became shy again, as if we had only just met. I suppose it was the ambiguity of our relationship, the transition from customer to friend not yet complete. I told you I thought the strike would continue the following day. You agreed. There was a pause, then you thanked me politely for the sightseeing tour. I panicked, already anticipating the emptiness I would face the next day if I did not see you. Stumbling, stuttering, I managed to cough out a suggestion that we meet in the morning, that I take you to see if the campus was open, that if it was not... I ran out of steam then, too timid to suggest another ‘date’. But to my surprise you too seemed keen on the idea. Yes, as you told me later, you felt something for your nervous, stammering Eritrean taxi-driver, didn’t you? For the time being, though, neither of us could admit to our feelings. We were both sheltering behind the routine of our daily taxi ride together, saw it as the means to maintaining our contact.