Beneath the Lion's Gaze Read Free Page A

more trouble. And besides,” he added, “Sara said she’ll watch him for you.” After his mother, Yonas’s wife Sara was the only one Dawit listened to, if he chose to listen to anyone at all. “You look exhausted,” he said.
    A BLUE HAZE drifted from eucalyptus trees dotting the hillsides of Addis Ababa and clung to the horizon like a faint, tender bruise. It was dusk and a hollow wind whistled through a crack in the driver’s side window of Hailu’s Volkswagen where he sat. Yonas was in front next to him, both of them quiet. Dawit hadn’t responded when he’d knocked on his door, and only Yonas’s pleadings had prevented him from getting his key and forcing his way into his youngest son’s room. He slid his car out of the garage onto the wide dirt road used by motorists and pack animals alike.
    Hailu’s neighborhood was a series of newer houses with sprawling gardens and lush lawns, and the more modest old Italian-style homes made of wood and mud with wide verandas and corrugated-tin roofs much like the one he’d inherited from his father. Some owners with large gated compounds rented single-room mud-and-wattle homes to poorer families. The neighborhood had neither the opulent villas nor the decaying shanties of other areas, and it was where Hailu had spent much of his years as a young, newly married doctor. It was a community, and one that, more and more often, he didn’t like to venture far from.
    The car dug into potholes on the rocky terrain, straining from the weight of two grown men. Ahead of them and all around, the green hilly landscape, crested with bright yellow
meskel
flowers, rolled against an orange sky. From this point on the road, Addis Ababa’s hills blocked Hailu’s view of the drab concrete-and-glass office buildings that had sprung up in the sprawling city in the last few decades, their ugly façades dominating every street, crowding out the kiosks and fruit stands that struggled to maintain the spaces they’d occupied for decades.
    He’d grown to dread driving, the stalls, the false starts, the thick noise that pushed through the confines of his car and competed with his thoughts for attention. Everything seemed too loud these days: the exhaust fumes and engines, the brays of stubborn donkeys, the cries of beggars and vendors. The endless throngs of pedestrians. In his car, in the shelter of the regulated heat, he was comforted by the familiar parameters.
    Yonas pointed out the window towards the stately high walls of the French Legation that were slowly shrinking in the distance. “I used to cut through the estate to go to school before they put that wall up.” He chuckled. “The
zebenya
almost caught Dawit one day when he tried to follow me. He chased him with his stick. Dawit wanted to come back and find the old guard.” Yonas shook his head, smiling and staring at the wall.
    “I’m not used to seeing that stone wall, even after all these years,” Yonas said. There were dark circles under his eyes and he tapped the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, a nervous habit Hailu saw only rarely.
    They were on a smoother road now, rocky bumps giving way to a paved flatness that was far less damaging to his tires. If he had been alone, he would have sped up, but he wanted to linger in this moment in the car with his son and hear him talk of better days.
    Along the side of the road, street vendors were taking down their stalls for the day, pulling out their long poles from the ground, folding large plastic sheets that served as awning against rain. Hawkers called out reduced prices on their wares, competing for attention in the noise and congestion. One young woman delicately balanced a baby on her hip as she arranged her neatly stacked rows of cinnamon sticks and
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on a thin cloth in front of her, the bags of crushed red pepper bright as rubies. Shoeshine boys planted on every street corner squatted and whistled at businessmen rushing towards crowded parking lots. A