Chapter Circle of Stones #2
“That’s how it often goes,” he said, drinking his coffee in one gulp and handing me back the cup. “The reason for revenge goes forgotten, but the urge to avenge persists. The Goat Heads didn’t play soccer, those are lies. They weren’t playing soccer. They were dancing their ancestral rite.”
After that, the carpet merchant’s words echoed through my sleepless nights. Before my eyes, in an endless loop, I kept seeing images of that supposed Malencoii dance, slow, solemn, and bloody.
I had to speak to Zahra Bayda; only she could ease my nightmare.
But she wouldn’t talk about it with me, nor with anyone, nor would she talk about anything else.
I’d be right next to her and she’d act as if I didn’t exist. We fulfilled our tasks in silence, each to their own, and her indifference crushed me.
It’s true that I hadn’t been there on that horrific night, as she had, wrapping dead women in white cloth and children in woolen blankets.
I hadn’t had to figure out which head belonged to which body to preserve the dignity of the corpses and bury them shrouded and whole.
I hadn’t been present. But the despair fell over me too.
A memory surfaced in me, of a time when my mother and I passed a church where a burial was taking place.
Inside, funeral wreaths piled high and candles burned, while organ music, the scent of flowers, and incense smoke poured through the open doors.
My mother and I wanted a closer look. We went inside and sat in one of the back pews.
To my child’s eyes, it all seemed exciting, filled with grandeur.
When I saw the relatives embracing each other and drying their eyes with handkerchiefs, I felt their sorrow and started to cry.
That’s when my mother vigorously grabbed my arm.
“Don’t cry,” she commanded. “This isn’t our death.”
Her words cut off my emotions immediately, don’t cry, not our death. I felt ridiculous, ashamed.
In the days following the Dhamar massacre, I experienced that feeling again, of falseness, of being an impostor in my own sadness.
I was grieving for those women, but what right did I have to weep for them?
Wasn’t I centering my own pain? My depression seemed obscene, I felt my sorrow wasn’t real and that my ego might be seeking satisfaction through my compassion: Look at how sensitive I am, how I’m affected by the tragedies of others.
I became listless and apathetic, unsure what I was doing there in that silent house.
Should I make an effort to continue my research on the Queen of Sheba?
It didn’t make sense anymore, the Queen of Sheba was nothing more than a fairy tale invented by Flaubert, Malraux, and Hollywood for Westerners’ entertainment.
The worst kind of Orientalism, Said would say.
Here and now the only reality was terrifyingly cruel, and the only Queens of Sheba had had their throats cut along with their children by canned food thieves.
We’d been going that way for over two weeks.
The situation was so oppressive that I thought of leaving.
Where to, I didn’t care. I’d flee toward anywhere, just to get far away from all this distance.
The distance of Zahra Bayda. Seeking something like a homeopathic effect—similia similibus curantur, “like cures like”—I’d try to kill the distance with an even greater one.
But where to go? Because of war and a contagious illness on the rise, the highways were still closed off, areas around us occupied or locked down, clans on high alert, confrontations and attacks the order of the day.
Any journey would require intense logistical planning, checks and permits, and I’d have to act alone and of my own accord.
From my days of monastic seclusion, I’d learned that when you want to go somewhere but can’t, it’s best to let dreams carry you, either that or sit down and write. Dreaming and writing transport you wherever you want to go. And I’d go to Dhamar, the site of the massacre.
I’d go to Dhamar to face my fear, though it was closer to a panic.
Panic implies terror before the god Pan, that’s the root of the word, and Pan is the deity who inspires lascivious slaughters and rapes.
The Malencoii had danced in pools of blood under the auspices of a god unknown to them: Pan, with his goat horns.
I equipped myself with enough water. No need for a flashlight, the night hovered in a supernatural clarity and the moon’s skin shone with blue valleys and shadowy hollows.
I invoked her. I invoked the moon: Reveal your light, I said, while the sun’s light deceives us.
I had to worship her and make her my accomplice.
Something guided me to the exact location of the massacre.
Somehow I managed to arrive, though the sand and wind had erased every trace.
I removed my shoes before stepping on that ground, which had been watered with the victims’ blood and the perpetrators’ semen.
I knew that area held a rupture in natural space.
“Here, the dead women are alive,” I said.
I felt them sniffing at me. They were damp shadows, crawling, licking my feet.
I invoked some distant god: Help the dead women lose their fear, I begged, and the god advised me to light a fire.
I did it, and the dead women came nearer, seeking warmth.
That’s when I understood that what was terrifying wasn’t them, but their pain.
I was wearing a white shirt (something had told me it should be white) and I started to repeat, like a mantra or prayer, the names of the women sacrificed there, Mahader, Maraki, Abigail, Anisa, Haset .
. . the slow, rhythmic repetition crystallized the ritual, Zenha, Barhane, Meseret .
. . the intensity grew, the moment was approaching.
Anisa, Haset, Nigist, Barhane, Meseret. Nothing would happen to me as long as I kept repeating Abigail, Anisa, Mahader, Haset . . .
The light of the moon let me find what I was looking for: small things.
Minor abandoned belongings, objects that would have helped make those women and children’s days bearable.
Not the Queen of Sheba’s mythical riches of gold and incense, but little treasures, invisible, ordinary, like a wooden spoon I picked up and put in my backpack, or a frayed blanket that had still kept its color.
I also put away a comb missing a few teeth.
Some kitchen utensils, a plastic toy, a couple of bottles, the remains of paper flowers, an embroidered pillow, a bundle of cards, unclassifiable refuse, clothes turned to rags.
And, of course, shoes. Several of them lay scattered without their counterparts, of different shapes and sizes.
It’s known there’s something about shoes, because they always show up after accidents, fires, massacres, and brawls.
No crime scene goes without at least one abandoned shoe.
Victims lose them as they run, maybe that’s the explanation.
All I know for sure is that there’s a trail of shoes here, in Dhamar, testifying to the tragedy.
I gathered those objects and put them away carefully, because they were unique, blessed, pulsing like hearts. Then I headed toward the grave where the bodies lay.
At the center of that terrain bathed in moonlight, a large rusty red car part marked the place of burial.
Had our team put it there, as a kind of tombstone or sign?
The big piece of scrap metal was shaped like a disjointed flamingo, or perhaps a scorpion, and suddenly I saw it not as scrap metal at all but as one of Calder’s metal sculptures, half buried in the sand and worn by time.
As a funereal monument, that totem fulfilled its role well.
Bufalino says that death is a smoke screen between the living and the others, and that it’s enough to reach your hands into it for those on the other side to reach back toward you.
Maybe that’s why I devoted myself to the task of bringing over large stones.
Gradually, I arranged them around the red sculpture, counting the paces between stones, until I’d enclosed the grave in a circumference.
It was exhausting work, a heavy load even for a man my size.
My back ached, but I managed to finish the job before dawn, while the moon was still dancing with the wind.
Once encircled by the stones, the graveyard was contained.
There, inside, I buried the familiar objects I’d gathered from the debris, so they’d preserve the memory of lived lives. They’d serve as company and solace; they’d represent, for the dead women and their children, the protection of an abode.
Finally I sat down to rest. That cemetery was no longer a nothing in the middle of nowhere; it had become a place, with an entrance and exit.
A home. A lair surrounded by a protective ring.
A corral of stones for a flock of human remains.
A lasting marker that can let it be said: Here they lie.
Hic sunt. A terrain of their own where the dead women can reconcile with their own death, free now of all horrors.
Here they’ll rest in peace under the sheltering night.
I sat there for a long time. The silence was white, and the calm too.
I was about to leave when I saw her appear.
It was her again: the Queen of Sheba. She wore a diamond scorpion between her breasts.
Her hair shone silver in the moonlight and rippled in the wind.
She breathed open-mouthed, as if gasping for air, and she wept for those women.
Then she disappeared as gently as she’d arrived.
“May the peace of today speak for yesterday’s pain,” I said aloud, and I left too.
When I got home, I had wounds on my hands and sand in my boots, hair, and ears.
But I felt a kind of relief; finally, I had the right to weep.
The dead of these lands were no longer so unconnected to me; from now on, they’d be mine too.
And what if that ceremony was carried out in dreams, not in actual fact?
And what if I only described it, writing it down in my notebook?
It didn’t matter, I thought. In the end, dreaming is my way of being, and writing is my way of doing.
Facts, dreams, writing, burials, weeping, farewells: All of these are rituals, and all ritual is in itself a kind of embodiment.
Also, the dead don’t find out. They don’t opine.
They don’t join the funeral rites held in their honor; their presence is no more than a longing, or ghostly breath.
The dead don’t see us, but rather dream us, though for them dreaming and seeing are the same.
Mahader, Maraki, Abigail, Nigist, Anisa, Haset, Zenha, Barhane, Meseret . . .
I wanted to take a good shower before going to bed.
The expat house’s bathroom was primitive: The shower consisted of a row of four buckets of water strung high, each with a cord you pulled to make the bucket tip and pour the water on your head.
Since the nights were so cold, by dawn the water in the buckets was freezing.
I’d already gathered my flip-flops, soap, and towel when Zahra Bayda appeared, walked past me, and took over the bathroom.
I didn’t appreciate that she cut ahead of me like that, but I said nothing, what for, since she wasn’t going to answer.
I hovered near the door, annoyed, waiting my turn for the shower, when I heard the first bucket’s pour followed by Zahra Bayda’s scream; it seemed she hadn’t anticipated how icy the water would be at that hour.
It made me laugh. At least she screams, that wordless woman, I thought, the mice haven’t eaten her tongue, maybe that freezing shock can open her throat.
I wasn’t wrong. Two days later, Zahra Bayda sought me out in the storeroom, where I was unpacking medical supplies.
“Would you like a coffee?” she asked.
It wasn’t just any invitation, nor one I’d let pass, because Zahra Bayda made coffee in the traditional Ethiopian way: a complicated ceremony that took time, patience, and artfulness.
She started by washing the green coffee beans, and then, squatting before the brazier, she toasted them on a pewter plate.
Once they were toasted, she ground them by hand with mortar and pestle, mixed them with boiling water in a special coffeepot called a jebena, and added clove and ginger.
I watched her movements as she focused on the task without uttering a word or looking my way, but with that tilted smile of hers from better times.
She put a ceramic plate of popcorn between us, along with a smaller one bearing cardamom seeds.
She served me a first cup of strong coffee, then a second milder cup, and as if nothing had happened, she started listing out tasks waiting to be done.
Her voice made life, which had been on pause, resume its rhythm.