“What is the singer’s name?” he asked the waitress now, blinking rapidly to keep the tears back. It still surprised him how easily he cried since his release from prison. He pointed to the door behind him as if the man were standing there.
“Gideon,” the waitress said. “Once, he had a son.” She shook her head sadly.
II
Walking back to his home near the crowded Mercato, Gideon didn’t know what to make of the ferenjoch sitting in his favorite bar talking to Konjit. Seeing these foreigners had startled him so much he’d drunk his beer in three gulps. Maybe Konjit had put on the music for the tourists’ benefit. Maybe it was her way of asking why he hadn’t come to visit her in a week. Maybe it was her way of punishing him. So many people in Addis Ababa found small ways to make him pay for what he’d done in the past. Jabbing him with a sharp elbow in a crowd. Kicking him in the leg. Shrinking away from him as if he were a leper. He understood the language spoken in these moments. Expected it. Some days, when he thought of his son, wished for it. But the song, “Tizita,” had come like a sharp, bitter slap; the unexpectedness of Tilahun Gessesse’s soaring voice in the dark tej bet had been like a fist to his chest. It had been his own closing song whenever he had performed at the palace in the days before the Derg.
Samson, he would have called out if he’d had a voice — the shock of hearing that song had been that strong. He would have called out his son’s name, and in the country where he still had his voice, he would have still had his son and his son would have come running. Samson, my son.
Abbaba.
A muezzin’s voice rose from Anwar Mosque in the wind, light and vibrant. As he did every day when he heard the call to prayer, though he’d abandoned any religion long ago, Gideon touched his throat and cursed his gift, willed it to stay trapped where he’d shut it long ago. He walked by a small café near one of the overcrowded shops in the area and saw a group of men hunched over newspapers, frowning. A young newspaper vendor ran to him in dusty sandals and waved a paper in his face.
“Digging has started at the military compound,” the boy said, the corners of his dried lips stained from chewing the numbing khat leaves. There was a glazed look in his eyes, an out-of-focus stare that Gideon had once envied and even thought he’d needed.
He tried to wave the boy aside to let him pass when the boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bundle of khat. “And this?” he asked.
Gideon had tried the leaf for the first time soon after Samson disappeared, had wanted something to ease the loneliness that felt like a knife in his side. He’d chewed alone, in a dark corner of his modest home where Samson’s bed still lay unmade, just as he’d left it weeks ago. It was 1978. He was no longer a singer with a popular band loved by Emperor Haile Selassie. The emperor was dead. Hundreds had fled the country. Soviets and Cubans seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Soldiers were everywhere.
Two policemen had come at five a.m. to take his son for questioning. They’d promised to bring him back. Gideon knew of this familiar lie meant to quiet parents into submission. He’d grabbed his son with both arms around the waist and dropped to his knees. One of the policemen had taken his rifle and hit the back of his head again and again until he finally let go of his son. He’d gone immediately to the jail and was told to come back the next day. He’d spent the night on the jail steps, and when he’d gone back to the counter with his son’s picture, the weary officer had pointed him toward the hospital morgue. Try there, he said. They were all taken there last night.
When he hadn’t found Samson and two weeks had passed, Gideon went to a small kiosk in Mercato and asked the owner for khat.
“Gideon,” the owner said, “this isn’t like you. Wait instead, go to church, your son will come back.” But the owner hadn’t been able to look him in the eye and in the end he’d slid the tiny bundle of leaves toward him and refused Gideon’s money.
All the leaf did to him was make his sorrow take shape and come alive. It settled inside his chest, grew fur and teeth, and gnawed against his rib cage. His chest had felt as tight as a drum. The voice calling out for his son sounded like his wife’s, but when he turned, he found nothing but his own hand groping clumsily in the air for the woman who’d taught him how to love, then died in childbirth.
“Digging has begun,” the newspaper boy repeated, shoving the paper in his face. “Read about it. They’re working over there.” He pointed toward rolling hills where a military base sat. “If you lost someone in Qey Shibir, you should read this.”
Gideon paid for the paper and examined the front page. Standing at the end of a row of serious men and one woman was the tourist from Konjit’s bar.
He pointed to the photo and gave the newspaper boy a quizzical look.
“You don’t know?” the boy said. “There are graves in the military base. These people,” he pointed to the picture in the newspaper, “they came to dig up the bodies. They know how to do it.”
Gideon’s hand shook. His son had been taken to that jail; he’d followed the truck for as long as he could on foot then hailed a taxi to the gate. He’d memorized the license plate and seen the same truck, empty, in the jail parking lot. Gideon clutched the paper to his chest and leaned so hard on his good leg he almost tipped into the boy, the memory of the days searching for his only son pressing down like a heavy hand.
The soldiers had stared at him at the counter, his son’s photo pushed toward them with shaking fingers. They refused to respond to his questions. They tried to ignore him. They turned their backs and let him run his voice hoarse asking them where they took his son. They let him stand at the counter and weep for Samson. Then they began to tire of his never-ending sorrow. One of them threatened him. Another pleaded with him to go home. When he stayed, with that tilted stance that forced him to lean one elbow on the counter, they beat him back with fists and kicks. They swung their rifles into his short leg and watched him fall. They insulted his father’s name, his band, his dead wife. Still, Gideon woke the next morning and walked back to the jail, Samson’s photo in hand.
It was on the fourth visit that one of the soldiers had pulled out a small sheet of paper, then pointed to Gideon and said, “Maybe he’s the one the general’s looking for.”
He didn’t protest when they took him to another building next to the jail, because they knew where his son was and that was all that mattered. The soldiers shoved him in front of a large wooden desk where a man as thin as a dried stick coughed in his seat as he gripped his stomach. The man inspected him, beginning at his feet, his mouth curling as he glanced from one leg to the other, then broke into a wide smile when he got to Gideon’s face.
“The Great Voice of Ethiopia, with talent only worthy of an emperor, is here in my office volunteering to sing for our cause?” the man had asked. “How did we get so lucky?”
On his way home, Gideon remembered a story he learned in school. Once upon a time, there was a goat who believed he was king. He was caught by a peasant who mistook the king for a goat. Just sing, he told himself. Nothing changes just because it is called something else. A song is only a song, but a son, he reminded himself again and again, a son... And he stopped and sighed at all a son could be.